This exhibition explores the creative dialogue between photographer Larry Fink (1941-2023) and sculptor Martha Posner (born 1956), who were romantic partners for more than 30 years. Radically different artists, their work nonetheless shares common themes of desire, vulnerability, and brutality. Both also explore myth throughout their art: Posner explicitly, through her re-imagining of female subjects from various legends and mythic traditions; Fink implicitly, through his shrewd eye for human impulse, folly, and bravado, qualities he found in almost every scenario no matter how base or exalted.
Both artists embrace the animal world almost as an extension of the human, a reflection of their life on a Pennsylvania farm surrounded by other creatures. Their rural existence brought them close to life cycles and earthy needs. Fink began photographing the farm and neighboring community in the 1970s. Posner arrived in the 1990s and immediately took to her surroundings, finding magic and transfiguration—processes in which she firmly believes—throughout the woods and meadows.
Viewing these artists side by side reveals subtle and surprising qualities in both. The exhibition will broadly survey each of their independent bodies of work, with an eye to how creative partners influence and surprise each other.
This exhibition is organized by Sarasota Art Museum of Ringling College of Art and Design and curated by Peter Barberie, the Brodsky Curator of Photographs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
This exhibition is made possible, in part, with generous support from:
Gold Sponsors
Charlotte and John Suhler
Silver Sponsors
Ginny and Ravi Akhoury
Ellen Chapman and Michael Moss
Carole Crosby and Larry Wickless
Wil and Sally Hergenrader Endowed Fund for Special Exhibitions
The Kretzmer Family Charitable Foundation, in loving memory of Ernest Kretzmer
Amy Carol McGowan
Special thanks to Elizabeth and William Kahane and
MUUS Collection is a group of photography archives based in the United States that brings together bodies of work that mark major turning points in history. As a functional archive with nearly half a million images and supporting ephemera, MUUS Collection preserves and promotes invaluable artifacts for generations to come, and is committed to keeping photographic memory alive by showcasing and elevating the works of the artists it represents.
Photographs are, as the theorist Roland Barthes wrote, “certificates of presence,” verification that a moment, a person or a place existed. From the adoration of a loved one or the wonder felt before nature to the hardship of labor or the devastation of war, photographs can be imprinted with the totality of human experiences.
Visually striking and intricate, Chie Fueki’s paintings capture contemporary life in full motion. Known for her vibrant and densely layered works, Fueki synthesizes Japanese ukiyo-e atmospheric techniques with Western abstraction to transform familiar scenes into luminous“floating worlds.”
What does it mean to visualize the unknown? Award-winning glass artists Monica Guggisberg and Philip Baldwin examine the profound mysteries that underpin our understanding of the universe in their upcoming exhibition at Sarasota Art Museum of Ringling College of Art and Design.
Sarasota Art Museum of Ringling College of Art and Design (SAM) is pleased to participate in Blue Star Museums, a program that provides free admission to currently serving U.S. military personnel and their families during the summer. The 2026 program will begin on Armed Forces Day, Saturday, May 16, 2026, and end on Labor Day, Monday, September 7, 2026.
Five regional art museums, the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg; The John and
Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota; Sarasota Art Museum of Ringling College of Art and Design, Sarasota;
the Tampa Museum of Art; and the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, are pleased to
announce a call to artists for “Skyway 2027: A Contemporary Collaboration”, the fourth iteration of the exhibition
celebrating the diversity and talent of artistic practices in the Tampa Bay area and beyond.
Sarasota Art Museum of Ringling College of Art and Design (SAM) is pleased to present “Beautiful Ideas: The Prints of Sol LeWitt,” on view from May 17 through October 25, 2026. This exhibition explores the extensive printmaking career of Sol LeWitt (1928–2007), a leader of the American Minimalism and Conceptual art movements who famously declared that “the idea becomes a machine that makes the art.”
Sarasota Art Museum of Ringling College of Art and Design (SAM) announces its 2026-2027 season, featuring a lineup of seven exhibitions including works by some of the most beloved and influential photographers of the 20th-century, award-winning glass artists, a father and son artistic lineage, multiple Ringling College of Art and Design talents and more.
Fourth Tuesdays | 5:30 pm – 7:30 pm