Harn Museum opens Oliver Jeffers ocean installation that visitors can help fill

The Harn Museum of Art opened Oliver Jeffers: Life at Sea in Gainesville, Florida, on September 29, 2026. The free installation invites visitors to make paper sea creatures and add them to an underwater scene that is designed to grow over the exhibition’s run through May 30, 2027. For families, the central activity is participation: the picture changes as visitors contribute to it.

The installation is in the Julia and Budd H. Bishop Gallery at the University of Florida museum. The Harn describes it as an interactive space for visitors of all ages, inspired by Jeffers’s illustrated book Here We Are: Notes for Living on Planet Earth. Its ocean begins with little marine life; visitors are invited to populate it with fish and other aquatic creatures.

How visitors add to Oliver Jeffers: Life at Sea

The Harn says visitors can decorate and install their own sea creatures in the illustrated seascape. Its exhibition description specifically mentions paper fish and other aquatic life. The starting point is deliberately sparse, so the accumulating contributions are part of the work’s design rather than a finished display that visitors only observe.

The gallery also includes a sunken ship and a reading nook. According to the museum, the nook features books by writers whose work encourages imaginative thinking about care for the environment. Those elements give visitors more than one way to engage with the underwater setting, while the paper creatures provide the direct contribution to the shared scene.

Why the seascape begins nearly empty

The museum connects the sparse opening scene to threats facing marine life, naming pollution, commercial fishing and rising water temperatures. It presents the growing collection of visitor-made creatures as an imagined restoration of the depicted habitat. That is the exhibition’s visual and educational premise; the added paper animals do not represent a measured change in the real ocean.

Jeffers described the idea during an earlier interview with Creative Bloq while Life at Sea was showing at the Brooklyn Museum. He said visitors would add sea life to an initially barren seascape, allowing it to become more abundant over time. He framed that change as a way to imagine a future people would want to build. His comments explain the participatory concept, rather than documenting how Gainesville’s gallery looks now.

From Brooklyn Museum to Gainesville

The Brooklyn Museum organized Life at Sea. The Harn identifies Sharon Matt Atkins, the Brooklyn Museum’s deputy director for art, and Keonna Hendrick, its deputy director for learning and social impact, as the exhibition’s curators. Creative Bloq reported that the installation was showing at the Brooklyn Museum during its earlier interview with Jeffers, and listed that presentation through April 26, 2026.

That earlier presentation offers context for the work’s approach, but it does not establish how many people have participated in Gainesville or how full the Harn’s seascape has become. The Harn’s own exhibition page lists Life at Sea as current and describes the scene as something visitors will build over time. Its final appearance depends on contributions during the run.

Free admission, location and opening hours

The Harn Museum of Art is at 3259 Hull Road in Gainesville, on the University of Florida’s Cultural Plaza. Admission is free. The museum lists hours of 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday; 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursday; and 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday. It lists no Monday hours.