For the past 16 years, residents of Sarasota have worked to transform the old campus of Sarasota High School into a contemporary art museum. Saturday morning, Sarasota Art Museum finally opened to the public.
“We had to keep the community interested for 16 years — and they were, ” said Lois Stulberg, one of the founders of SAM, more formally known now as Sarasota Art Museum of Ringling College. “It’s been a long, wonderful journey.”
Tom Koski, another museum founder, said the project holds a special place in his heart because he graduated from Sarasota High School in 1978.
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“I remember watching the deterioration of this building, and when I became involved my only interest was to save the building. I almost didn't care what they did with it, ” Koski said. “But to have it as a museum and having learning continuing in it is just special. It's exactly what this building is meant for.”
“This building is iconic. Some of us spent three or four years here going to classes, ” he said. The idea of it being demolished is just terrible. We fought to keep it alive, and in the hands of Ringling it has become just better than it ever has been.”
Through the front doors, you’ll find yourself in a spacious, white lobby with a colorful wall painting installation created by Leah Rosenberg. The stripes begin in an orderly fashion, then begin to diverge and dance along the walls as they lead up stairwells to the second and third floors.
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The 28 colors of Sarasota include a purple named “Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall, ” a grayish color named “‘Snooty’ the Manatee, ” and a deep green named “Selby Gardens (after the rain).”
While this design will stay on the stairwell walls, there will be no permanent exhibitions. As SAM’s founders originally intended, it will be a home for temporary, touring exhibitions of contemporary art. Each exhibit will generally be on display for four or five months.
The second floor is housing a solo exhibition of Vik Muniz, which will run only until March. Muniz first came to the U.S. from Brazil as a poor immigrant. He bought a book at a garage sale of 100 iconic images for 25 cents. He loved the book, lost it, then began drawing the photos from memory.
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“Vik began to realize very quickly that photographs represent our collective memory. And so he drew these and then he rephotographed them. Why? Because photography is our medium of truth, ” said Anne-Marie Russell, executive director of the museum. “We live in a society that traffics reproductions as evidentiary material.”
Dozens of people flooded into the museum early Saturday morning, chattering about the different works of art, debating their meanings and reminiscing about when they attended classes in the building.
“The thing that’s so wonderful about the arts is that it gives you the opportunity to have those conversations that you normally will not have, ” said Michele Parchment, the director of public engagement for SAM. “The museum is a place of safety, learning, knowledge, wisdom, engagement, but most importantly, above all of that, it’s about community.”
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Parchment said it was important for her to have Norman Lewis’ work in the museum. Lewis, a 20th century African American abstract artist, was essentially left out of the canon of art, especially abstract art, until he died, she said.
Lewis’ work is featured in the exhibit “Color. Theory. & B/W, ” on the third floor, which also features Sheila Hicks’ “Questioning Column, ” a display of colorful yarn that hangs from the high ceiling, bathed in natural light.
Odita studied Sarasota and Newtown, and created a vibrant, colorful piece depicting movement of patterns. Parchment said it represents the migration of the Newtown community from Overtown.
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“When you when you take a chance to really look at his work, there's a lot of movement, so that’s reflective of the movement of Sarasota, ” Parchment said. “It’s a wonderful way of recognizing and understanding that on different levels. These are the things that people will be learning and youth are learning — something different that they’re not going to get within the walls of their schools.”
In Sarasota’s first contemporary art museum, the exhibits will be ever-changing. But works such as those by Odita and Rosenberg, not to mention the building itself, ensure that eye to the future never loses sight of the city’s history.
If you go: Sarasota Art Museum of Ringling College, 1001 S. Tamiami Trail, Sarasota. Admission is $15 and free to members, Ringling College students, faculty and staff; Cross College Alliance students; public and life safety officers; veterans and active military and children 17 and younger accompanied by an adult. Hours are Mondays and Wednesdays through Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sundays from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. 941-309-7662; sarasotaartmuseum.orgIn Sarasota, the subtropics meet the South. Pressed up against the edge of the Gulf of Mexico in southwest Florida, this city, long home to carnies and cowmen, is best understood as a study in contrast. Now the new Sarasota Art Museum of Ringling College, which opened last month, aims to spotlight the city’s cultural depth and diversity.
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A cadre of residents forged the idea for a modern art museum more than 15 years ago, because, while there was a wealth of arts organizations in town, few venues dedicated to contemporary art existed. Their conversations led to a $22 million fund-raising effort to reanimate the former site of Sarasota High School as a kunsthalle — a non-collecting art institution showing only temporary exhibits.
Residents, staff and donors hope the nonprofit museum will provide a cross section of modern and contemporary art as complex as this town.
Some of the first Americans in the region were of the Uzita tribe, who died or disappeared after Spanish explorers arrived in the 16th century. At the end of the 19th century, Sarasota took shape through agriculture and fishing along the Gulf. Later, writers like John D. MacDonald, Joy Williams and Stephen King would call Sarasota home, as well as architects like Paul Rudolph and Victor Lundy.
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“There are so many different Sarasotas, ” said Anne-Marie Russell, the museum’s executive director and curator, adding that the city’s layered past serves as a guide for developing the museum’s exhibitions and programs.
While inaugural exhibitions include a retrospective of the Brazilian-born artist Vik Muniz, and a number of site-specific installations, future shows will highlight the influence of the Sarasota School of Architecture in projects beyond the county lines; the town’s role in the avant-garde; and a project that weaves together commissions, oral histories and public programming to celebrate the region’s history. A group show now on display, “Color. Theory. & b/w” includes a roster of artists like Sheila Hicks and Kara Walker but also Christian Sampson, an artist who grew up in neighboring Bradenton and studied at Ringling College.
The range of exhibitions underscores not only the museum’s commitment to bring international artists, curators and thinkers to Sarasota, but also to better understand those who came of age there or now call the city home.
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“Sarasota’s been cosmopolitan for a century because of the circus, ” Ms. Russell said of the Ringling Brothers Circus’s presence there. “That set the stage for Sarasota being open to so many different things.”
In 1911, John Ringling and his wife, Mable, bought property along Sarasota Bay, and years later moved the circus’s winter headquarters there. The circus, coupled with a land boom, drew innumerable people to town. After Ringling died in 1936, his art collection and property would later help establish the John and Mable Ringling Art Museum.
The city’s cultural footprint grew in the following decades, with an opera house, a ballet company, the Southeast’s largest repertory theater, an art school and now this new museum.
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Fittingly, the Sarasota Art Museum’s campus lays claim to some of the area’s most indelible architecture. The main building, which spans 57, 000 square feet, was designed in 1926 by M. Leo Elliot as Sarasota High School; it welcomed its last student in 1996. Just behind it, Paul Rudolph — a figurehead of the Sarasota School of Architecture — designed an addition in 1960. The former, a collegiate Gothic building, is now connected to the low-slung modernist one as part of the redesigned museum. The project was led by Lawson Group Architects, with Terence Riley of Keenan/Riley working as the design architect.
The vitality and mystery bound up in this town is something Ms. Russell hopes to find reflected in the museum. “My great hope for the museum is that this becomes Sarasota’s living room and backyard. I want everyone to feel like this is their home; that there’s something here for them.”
Open from Wednesday until Monday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. except Sundays when it opens at 11 a.m.; Admission is $15, free to members, Ringling College students & faculty, active military and other groups.
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