Upcoming Harn Museum exhibition features extraordinary local collection100 works by 77 renowned artists of 20th- and 21st-centuries

January 9, 2008

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — It is with great pride and tremendous pleasure that the Harn Museum of Art presents the monumental exhibition “Paradigms and the Unexpected: Modern and Contemporary Art from the Shey Collection” from Feb. 10 to May 18. Gainesville residents Stephen and Carol Shey have been among the Harn’s most generous and constant friends since the museum opened in 1990, graciously making their collection available to scholars, students, museum groups and the university community.

“Paradigms and the Unexpected” features major artists and art movements of the 20th- and 21st-centuries with strengths in four areas: Early American Modernism, mid-20th century Abstract Expressionism, Bay Area Figurism and a broad range of sculpture. The exhibition explores the range and complexity of 75 artists’ work over multiple decades in their careers. In the exhibition and accompanying 236-page catalogue, 100 paintings, drawings and sculpture from the Shey collection are divided into two sections, modern and contemporary, with some overlap between the two to allow for shared affinities among certain works. The works will be installed in the Harn’s three changing exhibition galleries, in the Magoon Garden and on the front grounds of the museum.

The Harn Museum welcomes as co-curator of the exhibition the museum’s founding director, Budd Harris Bishop, who led the museum for 10 years before retiring in 1998. Bishop has served as both friend and art advisor to the Sheys. In his 33 years as director of three art museums, he supervised three building programs, built numerous collections and organized dozens of exhibitions. Joining Bishop to organize the exhibition are Harn Curator of Modern Art Dulce Román and Curator of Contemporary Art Kerry Oliver-Smith.

The section devoted to modern art features 36 landscapes, cityscapes, still life, figural subjects and pure abstractions representing important modernist movements in American art such as Cubism, Geometric Abstraction, Precisionism, Realism and Regionalism. Featured are 27 artists including Alexander Archipenko, Milton Avery, Thomas Hart Benton, Charles Burchfield, Ralston Crawford, Stuart Davis, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Georgia O’Keeffe, Charles Sheeler and Joseph Stella, among others.

Contemporary works in the exhibition include 64 objects beginning with the extraordinary innovations of Abstract Expressionists working during the post-World War II period. Other important artists represent Pop, Minimalist and Post-Minimalist movements that exerted an equally dynamic and world-wide influence. Later works on view demonstrate the diverse and innovative directions of artists working in the realm of neo-expressionism. Featured are 48 artists including Linda Benglis, Jim Dine, Barry Flanagan, Helen Frankenthaler, Hans Hoffmann, Al Held, Alex Katz, Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, Robert Motherwell, Ken Noland, George Segal, Frank Shapiro, Frank Stella, Donald Sultan and Betty Woodman, among others.

The exhibition is sponsored by Shands at the University of Florida, The C. Frederick and Aase B. Thompson Foundation, Nathan S. Collier, S.F.I., Mercantile Bank and the Eloise R. Chandler Endowment. For more information call 352-392-9826 or visit www.harn.ufl.edu.