“Six Forms of Address” is the inaugural public exhibition of “Making Publics,” a new graduate seminar led by Conrad Cheung (Assistant Professor of 3D + Extended Media, School of Art + Art History).

Conceived as a public experiment, the exhibition collaborates with the Hippodrome Theatre in downtown Gainesville as a site for stress-testing how publics are made — through format, framing, and modes of address — rather than assumed in advance.

On view Feb. 3 – Mar. 2, 2026 at the Hippodrome Theatre. Free and open to the public.

Artists: Maria del Pilar Arrieta, Natalia Guerrero, Rachel Horn, Changil Kim, Benedicta Opoku-Mensah, Kyle Selley.Six Forms of Address is an exhibition and public experiment produced by the graduate seminar Making Publics, led by Conrad Cheung, at the UF School of Art + Art History Rather than assuming an audience in advance, the exhibition collaborates with the Hippodrome as a testing ground: how do different kinds of work call out, invite in, or withhold from the people who encounter them here?

Across various media, these works activate distinct modes of address through craft and labor, abstraction and pattern, movement and residue, cultural memory and material process. Some pieces translate histories carried through textiles, domestic tools, and material traditions; others emerge from acts of collecting, burning, erasing, or marking time. Together, they stage encounters shaped by attention, touch, scale, and use rather than explanation alone.

As part of the seminar, each artist's wall text was drafted by two peers, then revised through a workshop into a single final text. This exhibition asks what it means to meet a work without being told who it is for, and how publics are formed through the ways art appears and circulates in shared space. What kinds of publics are produced by different modes of address - education, intimacy, friction, humor, craft, ritual, aftermath - and what becomes visible when the work is asked to speak across strangers?