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University of Florida University Galleries

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University of Florida University Galleries

UF University Galleries is comprised of three art galleries that play an integral role in the teaching mission of the School of Art + Art History. Gary R.

University Galleries is comprised of three art galleries that play an integral role in the teaching mission of the School of Art + Art History, College of the Arts at the University of Florida, as well as serving the entire UF and Gainesville community. For the 2015-2016 academic year we have 17 varied exhibitions featuring the talent of our students, faculty and alumni. All exhibitions include an

opening reception featuring refreshments and live music. We hope you will join us! Our Locations:
Gary R. Libby University Gallery: 400 SW 13th St, Gainesville, FL 32611. For the past 14 years the Gary R. Libby University Gallery has collaborated with myriad UF colleges, community and regional entities in creating a trans-disciplinary venue for the visual arts. Libby Focus Gallery: 850-square-foot space that presents student-curated exhibitions featuring student, alumni and Florida/regional artists. The Gary R. Libby Focus Gallery is located adjacent to the lobby of the School of Art + Art History’s Fine Art Building C. Grinter Gallery: located in the lobby entry area of Grinter Hall, which houses Graduate School offices, and the Centers for Latin American Studies and African Studies. Its mission is to present art and artifacts by international and multicultural artists through student-curated exhibitions.

04/29/2026

🌟 MFA II 🌟

On view until May 1st 2026

In this second part of the 2026 Master of Fine Arts Exhibition, we include the work of Bendicta Opoku-Mensah, Lainie Ettema, and Nicholas Phitides. The work of Opoku-Mensah speaks to the idea of inherited memory and cultural practice via her convening of African women in the act of macramé. In Weaving Our Haven, the artist comments on histories of gender. Opoku-Mensah literally and figuratively weaves a tapestry of memory and survivance, grounded in the ideas of
Africana Womanism that locates itself in the specificity of the global Black experience.

Nicholas Phitides conjures the sublimity and uncanniness of memory in his paintings Faultlines and Vandals (red sky) that draw equally from the language of mass media and the collective unconscious; things that we’d never think to notice—an abandoned house, a backyard conflagration, an eerie throughway—are made monumental and confrontational in their isolating and sinister environmental storytelling.

In Slippage, Lainie Ettema brings the liminal space of a restroom to the gallery. Her work renders the bathroom as her canvas, onto which a feminine body is abstracted and dismembered. By using this mundane site as the ground of vibrant abstraction, Ettema teases the boundary between individual and collective experiences with body, hygiene, and gender using the bathroom as a battleground of societal regulation. Memory is circuitous, unreliable, yet beautiful and profound to the human experience. We invite you to bring your own memories to the works and the gallery as you explore, however fleetingly, the Topographies of Memory.

04/07/2026

MFA I

Until Friday April 10! View our first installment of our MFA thesis shows.

🌟Featuring 🌟
Aurora Pavlish-Carpenter
Nicholas Phitides
Kyle Selley
Hannah Shipley

Slide 1: Visitor facing a wall installation of sculpted hands and sea themed star shaped forms in a gallery.
Slide 2: Two people looking at a colorful, immersive abstract wall installation.
Slide 3: Two visitors viewing expressive paintings of houses and fire scenes.
Slide 4: Installation with sculptural palm trees, hand elements, and sand along a wall.
Slide 5: Woman posing in front of a textured, painted wall installation with wallpaper and carpet.
Slide 6: Contemporary gallery with painted floral panels.

01/21/2026

Art as a learning space

Institute for Collecting Pedagogies closes soon. Don’t miss out. Ends Jan. 23rd. Stay tuned for our Juried Student Exhibition opening Feb. 6th!

10/30/2025

In the Gary R. Libby Focus Gallery today, 𝘓𝘰𝘯𝘨𝘪𝘵𝘶𝘥 𝘥𝘦 𝘰𝘯𝘥𝘢𝘴 (part 2), a selection from a 1998 video exhibition organized by Jesús Fuenmayor, will be on view.

Run Time: 56 minutes, 51 seconds

Video Descriptions:

Chris Burden
Velvet Water
1971
5 minutes
This documentary video of a performance shows the interest that Burden expresed during the seventies in problems such as the psychological experience of danger, pain and physical
risk, the aggressive abuse of the body as an artistic object and the exploration of the artist-spectator relationship psychology. In the video Burden emulates some of his best-known actions, such as the famous performance in which he appears as the target of a shotgun-wielding assailant or when he “crucified” himself to a car. Velvet Water shows Burden
trying to breathe underwater, or as he himself says, “trying to extract oxygen from the water”, in an action that, due to its long duration, drives viewers to exasperation.

Gabriel Orozco
Before the Waiting Dog
1993
30 minutes
Originally made as a personal record, this video was recorded during sessions in supermarkets that the artist conceives for the camera. The video is a “documentary” record,
like that in quotes, because although it adheres to the “realistic” domestic quality, as is usual in creators who want to privilege the idea over the form, it nevertheless invites us to a revelation product of an extremely simple operation. The artist recorded the video carrying the camera on his back, pointing it in the opposite direction to his path: in this
way the objective and subjective point of view converge (the artist stripped of his entity and materiality).

(Continued in comments)

10/29/2025

In the Gary R. Libby Focus Gallery today, 𝘓𝘰𝘯𝘨𝘪𝘵𝘶𝘥 𝘥𝘦 𝘰𝘯𝘥𝘢𝘴 (part 1), a selection from a 1998 video exhibition organized by Jesús Fuenmayor, will be on view.

Run Time: 44 minutes, 12 seconds

Video Descriptions:

Jose Antonio Hernandez-Diez
𝘚í𝘯𝘥𝘳𝘰𝘮𝘦 𝘧𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘬𝘰𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘢
1997
10 minutes
In the years that Hernández-Diez made this work, he concentrated on collecting images of an intimate dimension. In his persistent effort to translate into a formal language,
experiences that belong to the memories of childhood and adolescence, the artist produced works such as the video Freskolita Syndrome , in which he himself is shown throwing a
constant stream of the popular soda drink in an obvious reference to the work Fountain by Bruce Nauman. Perhaps what the artist proposes is a metaphorical way to talk about the deceits we use to calm the anguish that afflicts us, and expose that empty being that prevails in our contemporaneity.

Martha Rosier
𝘚𝘦𝘮𝘪𝘰𝘵𝘪𝘤𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘒𝘪𝘵𝘤𝘩𝘦𝘯
1975
6 minutes 9 seconds
Performance of the artist for the camera in which she is presenting and naming at the same time different kitchen utensils with an expression of rage and irony that evidences the condition of social subjugation of women. The contrast of Rosler’s gestures with the stereotypes of permissible behavior in the domestic environment, accentuates the highly
codified nature of the relationship between utensils and femininity and its dialectic with systems of oppression.

Peter Campus
𝘛𝘩𝘳𝘦𝘦 𝘛𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘴𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴
1973
Color
4 minutes 53 seconds
Campus appears in this video, in three sequences. In the first we can see him going through a wall and through his own body. In the second it appears, thanks to technological
gadgets, that he is erasing his face only to show it again, and in the last image, his face is burned, dramatizing through the video the distressing impossibility of escaping ourselves.

(Continued in comments)

10/28/2025

Today in the Gary R. Libby Focus Gallery, three of Claudio Perna’s videos will be on view.

𝘓𝘢 𝘊𝘰𝘴𝘢 (𝘔é𝘥𝘢𝘯𝘰𝘴) (1972)
Created in collaboration with Eugenio Espinoza
Description:
Geography is more than space, more than cartography and delimitation; geographic space is a living being where anything can happen. This video shows us a canvas with an abstract geometric design – a checkered canvas, by the Venezuelan artist Eugenio Espinoza – that different people are moving, without a defined direction, on the dunes of Médanos de Coro National Park, in Venezuela. In this way, the work speaks to us, firstly, of the artists’ interaction with the geometric and, secondly, of the transformation of space into a gesture, into a symbol, when we interrupt their daily life or when we realize that, if the human is a type of landscape, the landscape also has a certain humanity, it is a being in itself.
Run Time: 7 minutes, 14 seconds

𝘜𝘳𝘣𝘢𝘯𝘰 / 𝘙𝘶𝘳𝘢𝘭 (1976) Description:
Another video by Perna, Urbano/Rural , also documents his exploration of the country’s geography. According to Silvia Benedetti: “The encounters between geography and art in
Perna’s oeuvre primarily focus on the Venezuelan territory, as he constantly and tirelessly worked to grasp every aspect of the country and its national identity as a way to understand his own individuality. His investigations amount to the search for heimat (home) that occupied him throughout his life.”

Perna’s Urban/Rural video piece is charged with the local geopolitical landscape, focusing on displacement from rural to urban areas, which is a process parallel to the changes in artistic practices (from landscape to modernist geometric art). Urbano/Rural is made up of two films initially shot in super 8, where rural and urban life are recorded. In the installation (or spatialized) version of this work, urban and rural images are projected onto a gentleman’s suit and a guayabera, respectively. It is a type of pioneering operation in the context of contemporary Latin American art, where few artists of Perna’s generation used avant-garde languages (such as documentary film) mixed with native them.
Run Time: 30 minutes

𝘛𝘳𝘪𝘤𝘰𝘭𝘰𝘳 (1973)
Run Time: 1 minute, 45 seconds

10/24/2025

On view today in the Gary R. Libby Focus Gallery is Regina Silveira’s 𝘜𝘮𝘢 𝘛𝘳𝘢𝘮𝘢𝘻𝘶𝘭 (2010)!

Video Description:
In 2010, the Brazilian plastic artist Regina Silveira packed the Museu de Arte de São Paulo facade with a work specially designed for the museum. A digital image on adhesive vinyl,
the work fully covered the museum’s external glass in the length and height of its four facades. In total, the covered area was 2,300 m². In Tramazul the image is of a blue sky
with light clouds, close to the images of skies that are naturally reflected in the glass of the buildings, with the difference that it is constructed as a gigantic cross-stitch embroidery. In these skies spread over the four sides of the museum, large needles virtually embedded in a weft of intense blue simulate embroidering the clouds scattered across the glass, with threads of three shades – between white and medium gray. Tramazul proposes itself as a
false reflection and at the same time as a camouflage that connects MASP’s embroidered sky with other neighboring skies, real or reflected, in a unique example of public or urban
art. Tramazul redefined the structure’s heavy modernist architecture, lightening it to include an idyllic reflection of nature.

Regina Silveira is internationally known for works that interfere in spaces and buildings, inside and outside them, such as the installation Lumen (2005) that covered the Crystal Palace of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, in Madrid; Tropel Reversed (2009), 700 m² adhesive vinyl on the Køge Art Museum, Denmark; the Entrecéu
installations , at the Vale Museum, in Espírito Santo (2007); Claralight, at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, in São Paulo (2003).
Run Time: 12 minutes, 36 seconds

10/23/2025

Today in the Gary R. Libby Focus Gallery, Sergio Vega’s 𝘗𝘢𝘳𝘢𝘥𝘪𝘴𝘦: 𝘙𝘦𝘸𝘪𝘳𝘦𝘥 (2017) will be on view. Come stop by!

Vega video description:
In Paradise: Rewired, video recording becomes a vehicle for empirical observation as the artist wanders aimlessly throughout the back roads of Mato Grosso. There is no production team or script, only an old map and the traveling cameraman determined to record his experiences and observations while searching for signs of paradise. He is in search of the Garden of Eden in the center of South America as described by Antonio de Leon Pinelo in his theory from 1650. Thus, the work is constructed as a space of thought in which chronological time overlaps with the timelessness of myth, history, memory, and literature.

Paradise: Rewired begins by interpreting the western myth of Paradise as illustrating the constitution of the Lacanian symbolic order and continues with the medieval scholastic
order of the world (Dante), from which nature emerges constructed as an archive in the Aristotelian fashion.

From the peculiar array of empirical source materials collected in the form of video clips, the artist draws in numerous artistic and philosophical references. A passage ponders the currency of Parmenides’ conception of the nature of reality as an ontological condition irreconcilable with subjective interpretation and representation. This notion is then confronted with an exploration of perception as phenomenological in stream of consciousness and what the artist calls the filmic act. James Joyce’s conception of the
cognitive functions specific to the modalities of the visible and of the audible are considered in relation to the body (among other bodies) in contrast to disembodiment as in
Joyce’s notion of the diaphanous. Terrestrial Paradise is thus constructed as a mode of being derived from the subject’s state of heightened perception and self-reflection interacting with the multiplicity of life forms that coexist in the Forest.
Run Time: 41 minutes, 14 seconds

10/22/2025

In the Gary R. Libby Focus Gallery, there are two videos on view today. From 10 AM - 2 PM, Cao Fei’s 𝘪. 𝘔𝘪𝘳𝘳𝘰𝘳 𝘣𝘺 𝘊𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘢 𝘛𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘺 (𝘈𝘒𝘈: 𝘊𝘢𝘰 𝘍𝘦𝘪) (2007) will be showing. Then from 2 PM - 6 PM, Candice Breitz’s 𝘗𝘳𝘰𝘧𝘪𝘭𝘦 (2017) will be showing.

Video Descriptions in comments below!

10/21/2025

Today’s videos on view in the Gary R. Libby Focus Gallery are Patricia Dauder’s 𝘍𝘰𝘳𝘸𝘢𝘳𝘥 (𝘧𝘪𝘭𝘮) and other assorted videos.

𝘍𝘰𝘳𝘸𝘢𝘳𝘥 (𝘧𝘪𝘭𝘮) (2010) Description:
“Forward (film) shows a series of landscape views and sport actions in a non-narrative, non-lineal, and fragmented manner. The images were filmed during a 2009 Professional
Windsurf Association World Cup competition held at Pozo Izquierdo Beach in the Canary Islands, a well-known spot for windsurfing due to its strong wind and wave conditions
throughout the year. The film was made and edited with the idea to be a faithful depiction of my spontaneous reactions to the place and the event as much as a true cinematographic
testimony of the rough environmental conditions that affected the shooting such as strong gales, big swell and dense humidity in the air hindering clear vision.“

The representation of a subject or an event, becomes almost a secondary aspect when viewing Patricia Dauder’s films. From the first moment, our attention is directed inevitably towards the perception of matter and space and the experience of time. The artist’s interest in working with spatial sensations, atmospheres and topographies combined with a will to give visibility to the concept of absence has led to the non-representation of facts and the prominence of an experience of viewing and perceiving.

Dauder’s films explore what lies at the heart of the medium: time and length on the one hand and editing on the other. Time seems to be suspended by the suppression of any sort of referential fact external to the image. Therefore, the film has its own inherent time, a “suspended time” that the artist acknowledges as characteristic of her working process.
Although observation of the natural world is a constant practice and a point of departure for many of her works, during the creative process, what’s figurative or identifiable fades to its mere disappearance becoming a slight trace, almost imperceptible.
Run Time: 6 minutes, 47 seconds

Address

400 SW 13th Street
Gainesville, FL
32611

Opening Hours

Tuesday	10am - 6pm
Wednesday	10am - 6pm
Thursday	10am - 6pm
Friday	10am - 6pm
Saturday	12pm - 4pm

Telephone

+3522733043

Website

https://www.universitygalleriesufl.com/

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