New Art Museum Adds to Sarasota’s Cultural Heritage

Update Residents, staff and donors hope the Sarasota Art Museum of Ringling College will provide a cross section of contemporary art as layered as Sarasota itself. In 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.

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. “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. “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.