university of florida - school of art & art history

The School of Art and Art History's studio and art history programs are housed in four buildings which comprise the Fine Arts Complex, located on the eastern edge of the campus. These buildings house classrooms, faculty and administrative offices, undergraduate and graduate studios, student lockers, lecture halls, the SAAH Wood Shop, the computer lab, the Focus Gallery, the University Gallery, the Visual Resources Center and the Architecture and Fine Arts Library.

Norman Hall

A short walk from the Fine Arts Complex, this building houses the art education program, including faculty offices, classrooms, lecture halls, a computer lab, a wood shop, a crafts facility, an exhibition space for the display of student work, and the Education Library.

University Galleries

The University Gallery is dedicated to an exhibition program with an emphasis on contemporary art, for the primary purpose of serving the department's teaching and research needs. The gallery originates important exhibitions of regional, national and international art, hosts traveling exhibitions and mounts exhibitions of SAAH generated works. Included in these are the Annual Art Faculty Exhibition, the MFA Thesis Exhibitions, the Annual Juried Student Art Exhibition, and other periodic group and one-person faculty exhibitions.

The Grinter Galleries are located in Grinter Hall. The exhibitions presented here are related to academic programming with an emphasis on international arts.

The Focus Gallery is a space adjacent to the office area of the School of Art and Art History. Under the supervision of the University Gallery, this area displays student and faculty art as well as small, invitational one-person exhibitions, on a monthly basis.

All three of the above exhibition programs are intimately associated with the school's teaching curricula. The galleries are located conveniently close to classroom activities.

Libraries and Resource Centers

Architecture and Fine Arts Library

With holdings of more than 90,000 items, and some 650 current periodicals, the library is an important statewide resource and the largest collection of its kind in the Southeast. All aspects of world art and design, historical and contemporary, are covered in depth, and the latest publications in the various fields, including the leading current periodicals, journals, museum and auction catalogs, and serials, are available. Material on all aspects of industrial design, new fabricating materials, antiques, furniture and decorative arts is also available.

Visual Resources Center

The Visual Resources Center houses a comprehensive collection of over 300,000 art and architecture slides. The 35mm slides cover a broad range of mediums, periods and geographic areas.The collection includes a growing digital database, Vision. Vision is a digital image management tool that performs as a search engine which accesses images for individual instructor collections for classroom presentation and student review.

Education Library

Areas covered by holdings in the Education Library include art education. Holdings include more than 100,000 volumes, 700 journals and the complete ERIC Microfiche collection. The Education Library, as well as the Architecture and Fine Arts Library, is part of the University of Florida Library System (the second largest institutional library in the Southeast), which holds more than 2,500,000 cataloged volumes, and 2,300,000 units of microform, and maintains more than 29,000 current serials and roughly 20,000 machine-readable database files.

Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art

The Harn Museum of Art, which opened in 1990, provides state-of-the-art facilities for the exhibition, study and preservation of works of art. The contemporary, 62,000-square-foot museum, which is one of the largest visual arts facilities in Florida and one of the largest university art museums in the nation, has strong collections in Precolumbian ceramics, African sculpture, Oceanic objects, arts of India, contemporary painting and sculpture, interactive media center/room and American paintings, prints, photographs and drawings.

The Harn Museum is a major source of instruction and aesthetic enrichment for students at the University of Florida. Aware that knowledge and appreciation of the arts are vital to transmit cultural values and to understand the human experience, the Harn Museum offers a range of educational programs for the general public as well as the academic community. These programs, which include film and lecture series, visiting artists, workshops and performances, are designed both to bring insight into current exhibitions and to develop a lifelong appreciation of art and culture.

The Harn Museum regularly enlists the cooperation of School of Art and Art History faculty, who lecture, guest curate exhibitions and participate in docent training programs. Students have the opportunity of direct involvement with the Harn through the museum's volunteer program, part-time paid positions, or internships. Study carrels are available to students interested in first-hand study of the collections.

Yon Hall

Information forthcoming...