Sarasota Art Museum Announces 2024/2025 Season Exhibition Schedule
Upcoming exhibitions feature contemporary art by local, national, and internationally renowned artists and designers
SARASOTA, Fla. (April 23, 2024) – Sarasota Art Museum announces an outstanding slate of exhibitions, underscoring the Museum’s commitment to presenting new commissions and site-specific installations, special exhibitions that reconsider the work of a single artist, and group exhibitions that explore compelling themes. The Museum’s expanded schedule includes Modern Masterpieces Uncovered: Galloway’s Furniture Showroom by Victor Lundy, a collaborative project that will explore an iconic architectural jewel in the context of the Sarasota School of Architecture and the pioneering work of architect Victor Lundy that opens on July 28, 2024. Larry Fink / Martha Posner: Flesh and Bone opening November 17, 2024, will immerse visitors in the creative dialogue between acclaimed photographer Larry Fink and sculptor Martha Posner, who were romantic partners and muses for one another for more than 30 years. Finally, a highly anticipated touring exhibition examining the intersection between design innovation and technological advancements in footwear, Future Now: Virtual Sneakers to Cutting-Edge Kicks, opens February 9, 2025, featuring digitally designed and 3-D printed shoes, sneakers made from mushroom leather and reclaimed ocean plastics, and footwear created for the metaverse.
“The upcoming season at the Museum is sure to delight, inspire, and engage audiences from near and far.” said Virginia Shearer, executive director of Sarasota Art Museum. “Through groundbreaking exhibitions and an exhilarating range of public programs, this season will be one of our most ambitious yet.”
Also, on view beginning this summer with an expansive multi-venue group exhibition, Skyway 2024: A Contemporary Collaboration, featuring more than 60 artists based in the Tampa Bay region opening July 28, 2024. In addition, this fall will feature three solo artist exhibitions: the first showcasing new paintings, works on paper, and artist books by multidisciplinary artist Tammy Nguyen opening October 20, 2024; an in-depth look at vibrantly colorful and often humorous sculptural works in Claire Ashley: Chromatic Blush opening October 20, 2024. Joe Fig: Contemplating Vermeer, featuring the much-anticipated new body of works in Joe Fig’s celebrated Contemplation series, debuts at Sarasota Art Museum on November 17, 2024. For her first solo museum exhibition opening May 4, 2025, Chris Friday: Where We Never Grow Old, the artist will explore imagined sanctuaries through her monumental drawing practice. Friday’s work will be presented in tandem with Personal to Political: Celebrating the African American Artists of Paulson Fontaine Press, a nationally traveling exhibition featuring fine art prints by renowned artists including Martin Puryear, Radcliffe Bailey, Kerry James Marshall, and Lava Thomas, as well as the Gee’s Bend Quilt Collective.
Further details about these exhibitions and other current and upcoming presentations follow below.
Sarasota Art Museum of Ringling College of Art and Design 2024-2025 Season:
Skyway 2024: A Contemporary Collaboration
July 28 – October 27, 2024
Sarasota Art Museum is proud to be part of the Skyway 2024 project, a multi-venue collaborative exhibition featuring over 60 artists based in the Tampa Bay region. Curators from the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg; the Tampa Museum of Art and the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum in Tampa; The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art and now Sarasota Art Museum in Sarasota, worked with guest juror Evan Garza to select this year’s artists from over 300 who responded to an open call. Since its launch in 2017, the Skyway triennial has helped galvanize an artist community spanning Hillsborough, Manatee, Pasco, Pinellas, and Sarasota counties, introducing artistic talents and vigorous practices to a larger audience. Sarasota Art Museum will feature recent work by 15 artists: Kim Anderson, Ryan Day, Sue Havens, Dominique Labauvie, Tatiana Mesa Paján, Samantha Modder, Roger Clay Palmer, Herion Park, Gabriel Ramos, Eszter Sziksz, Jill Taffet, Rob Tarbell, Kirk Ke Wang, Willow Wells, and Corinne Zepeda.
This exhibition is organized by Sarasota Art Museum of Ringling College of Art and Design and curated by Rangsook Yoon, Ph.D., senior curator at Sarasota Art Museum.
Modern Masterpiece Uncovered: Galloway’s Furniture Showroom by Victor Lundy
July 28 – October 27, 2024
The Galloway’s Furniture Showroom of Sarasota by Victor Lundy, one of three architectural jewels that define the Sarasota Art Museum Campus, is revealed and reimagined in this inspiring exhibition. The Sarasota School of Architecture masterpiece—with its two-story glass cylinder, exposed wood “morning glory” structure, and suspended mezzanine—became an instant landmark when it opened in 1959. Much of the original structure, material and detail, however, lay concealed due to renovations in the 1980s.
This exhibition explores the building’s past and the pioneering work of Victor Lundy through archival materials, uncovers its present through an innovative digital scan of the structure, and proposes design concepts for a future adaptive reuse conceived by Hampton University architecture students. This collaboration is part of Architecture Sarasota’s Hub initiative, which uses innovative design to help transform places and inspire lives. The project adds an exciting new dimension to preserving the legacy of the Sarasota School of Architecture—a regional movement that adapted modernist principles to the geography, climate, and socio-cultural context of South Florida’s Gulf Coast.
The exhibition is organized by Sarasota Art Museum of Ringling College of Art and Design and curated by Marty Hylton, president, Architecture Sarasota; Dr. Sujin Kim, assistant professor of Architecture, Hampton University in Hampton, Virginia; and Damien Blumetti, founding principal, Damien Blumetti Architect.
Tammy Nguyen
October 20, 2024 – January 19, 2025
Tammy Nguyen is a multidisciplinary artist renowned for her densely layered, intricate compositions that merge figures, abstract shapes, and lush tropical vegetation. Following her acclaimed 2023 solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, she unveils a brand-new body of paintings, works on paper, and artist book at Sarasota Art Museum. Nguyen deftly blends traditional painting with mixed media, creating composite images of familiar yet subversive symbols and motifs. These captivating images, with their seductively beautiful decorative surfaces, entice viewers into a web of entangled historical narratives. Committed to critically examining marginalized histories and colonial and imperial legacies, she probes the intersections of geopolitics, ecology, and spirituality.
Nguyen, based in Easton, CT, is assistant professor of art at Wesleyan University with an MFA from Yale University. She is a recipient of a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship, and a 2008 Fulbright Fellowship to study lacquer painting in Vietnam. Recent solo exhibitions were organized by Nichido Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan (2022), and Tropical Futures Institute, SEA Focus, Singapore (2022), among others.
This exhibition is organized by Sarasota Art Museum of Ringling College of Art and Design and curated by Rangsook Yoon, Ph.D., senior curator at Sarasota Art Museum.
Spray paint on PVC coated ripstop nylon, fan, approx. 15 x 15 x 15 ft. Courtesy of the artist.
Claire Ashley: Chromatic Blush
October 20, 2024 – January 19, 2025
Step into the immersive world of Claire Ashley’s colorfully painted, vibrant inflatables, and imagine an evolutionary future where new hybrid organisms emerge from the Anthropocene. For over a decade, Ashley has mined the language of painterly abstraction, monumental installation, and slapstick humor to create forms that are at once sculpture and painting. These two states offer a compelling metaphor for the human body, echoing its processes of tension and release. Challenging conventional notions of beauty and taste, Ashley presents her lumpy and luminous creations as both self-portraits and embodiments of broader narratives relating to femme bodies and cultural norms. The inflatables and soundscape in the multisensory Chromatic Blush invite viewers to bask in their voluminous presence and uninhibited, jubilant energy.
Originally from Edinburgh, Scotland, and now based in Chicago, Ashley teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she received her MFA. Her works have been exhibited at numerous national and international venues such as The Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, England; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, AR; and Milwaukee Art Museum in Milwaukee, WI, among others.
This exhibition is organized by Sarasota Art Museum of Ringling College of Art and Design and curated by Rangsook Yoon, Ph.D., senior curator at Sarasota Art Museum.
Larry Fink / Martha Posner: Flesh and Bone
November 17, 2024 – April 13, 2025
Flesh and Bone illuminates the creative dialogue between the late photographer Larry Fink and sculptor Martha Posner, who were romantic partners for more than 30 years. This exhibition broadly surveys their independent bodies of work, demonstrating how these radically different artists influence one another through themes of desire, vulnerability, and brutality. Myth is also a shared exploration 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.
Fink and Posner embrace the animal world almost as an extension of the human, a reflection of their rural existence on a Pennsylvania farm that 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 unexpected qualities in both.
This exhibition is organized by Sarasota Art Museum of Ringling College of Art and Design and curated by Peter Barberie, Brodsky Curator of Photographs, Alfred Stieglitz Center, Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Joe Fig: Contemplating Vermeer
November 17, 2024 – April 13, 2025
Contemplating Vermeer, featuring the much-anticipated new body of work in Joe Fig’s celebrated Contemplation series, debuts at Sarasota Art Museum in fall 2024. Fig’s small-scale, intimate paintings depict visitors locked in gaze with Johannes Vermeer portraits during the once-in-a-lifetime 2023 retrospective at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum. From his unique vantage point, Fig captures the subtle majesty of the seemingly ordinary subjects of Vermeer’s 17th-century paintings, and their enduring allure that attracted hundreds of thousands from around the world four centuries later. Through his deft skills of artistry and observation, Fig creates paintings within paintings that draw us in individually and bring us together through the shared museum experience.
Fig’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is housed in numerous museums, including Fogg Art Museum, Chazen Museum of Art, Norton Museum of Art, The New Museum of Contemporary Art and the Toledo Museum of Art, among others. Author of the acclaimed books Inside the Painter’s Studio and Inside the Artist’s Studio, Joe Fig is Department Chair of Ringling College of Art and Design’s Fine Arts and Visual Studies programs. He earned his BFA and MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York.
This exhibition is organized by Sarasota Art Museum of Ringling College of Art and Design and curated by Rangsook Yoon, Ph.D., senior curator at Sarasota Art Museum.
Future Now: Virtual Sneakers to Cutting-Edge Kicks
February 9 – May 4, 2025
This groundbreaking exhibition explores the intersection between design innovation and technological advancements in footwear. Future Now features over 70 futuristic designs from the Bata Shoe Museumʼs holdings as well as loans from other prominent institutions, collectors, designers, and inventors. Presenting digitally designed and 3D-printed shoes, sneakers made from mushroom leather and reclaimed ocean plastics, and footwear created for the metaverse, the exhibition explores how cutting-edge technologies, unexpected materials, and new ideas are transforming footwear today. The footwear included in the exhibition is designed to address industrial-age problems and capitalize on postindustrial possibilities. Featured designers and brands include: Salehe Bembury, rtfkt, Mr. Bailey, Zaha Hadid, JEMS by Pensole, Safa Şahin, EKTO VR, Saysh, Benoit Méléard, SCRY, and many more.
Future Now is a cornerstone and launching pad for Sarasota Art Museum’s 2024/2025 Education and Community Engagement Programs.
Sarasota Art Museum is one of five museums participating in the exhibition’s national tour, co-organized by the American Federation of Arts and the Bata Shoe Museum, and curated by Elizabeth Semmelhack, director and senior curator, Bata Shoe Museum.
Chris Friday: Where We Never Grow Old
May 4 – August 10, 2025
Chris Friday is a multidisciplinary artist best known for her larger-than-life yet intimate figurative drawings, meticulously created in chalk on black paper. For her first solo museum exhibition, she explores the notion of “incorruptible environments.” These are the imagined sanctuaries we construct in our minds—our refuge from the harsh realities of the modern world—and the worlds we aspire to bring to life. Tradition, religion, and culture form the bedrock of these environments, while nostalgia and memory act as potent vessels, preserving ideas of self, community, and identity. Friday’s diverse works, ranging from large-scale drawings to rugs and ceramics, serve as both contemplative reflections and counter-narratives to prevailing misrepresentations of Blackness in media and popular culture.
Friday’s work has been showcased in numerous group exhibitions nationally and internationally, including Rest is Power curated by the Center for Black Visual Culture at New York University (2023) and The Cartography Project at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Arts in Washington, D.C. (2022). Based in Miami, Friday has received numerous awards, fellowships and grants, and in 2023, was named the South Arts Southern Prize State Fellow for the State of Florida.
This exhibition is organized by Sarasota Art Museum of Ringling College of Art and Design and curated by Rangsook Yoon, Ph.D., senior curator at Sarasota Art Museum.
Personal to Political: Celebrating the African American Artists of Paulson Fontaine Press
May 4 – August 10, 2025
Personal to Political is a nationally traveling exhibition featuring 17 African American artists whose work embodies personal narratives, while engaging with political discourse of African Americans across the country. Collectively, these artists explore the human experience, by addressing history, identity and spiritual inspiration in distinctly individual ways. The exhibition is comprised of over 40 works by artists at various stages of their careers, each with unique backgrounds and artistic practices. The fine art prints featured in Personal to Political were produced collaboratively with artists at Paulson Fontaine Press in Berkeley, California, an artistic hub in the San Francisco Bay Area. This press has a long tradition of supporting both established and underrepresented artists working in a range of media, who may not have experience with printmaking. Drawing from Paulson Fontaine Press’s vast collection, Personal to Political includes renowned figures like Martin Puryear, self-taught artists like Lonnie Holley, and artists of the Gee’s Bend Quilt Collective in Alabama, who transform traditional textile patterns into graphic art forms (Louisiana Bendolph, Mary Lee Bendolph, Loretta Bennett, Essie Bendolph Pettway, Loretta Pettway). Other featured artists include Edgar Arceneaux, Radcliffe Bailey, McArthur Binion, Woody De Othello, David Huffman, Samuel Levi Jones, Kerry James Marshall, William Scott, Gary Simmons, and Lava Thomas.
Personal to Political is a nationally traveling exhibition organized by Bedford Gallery and curated by Carrie Lederer, former Bedford Gallery curator.
Hard ground etching with aquatint, 24.5 x 19 in. Courtesy of Paulson Fontaine Press, Berkeley, CA.
More information on these exhibitions will be available throughout the season. Please visit sarsotaartmuseum.org for the latest details on the 2023/2024 season exhibitions.
About Sarasota Art Museum
Sarasota Art Museum is a catalyst for appreciation and understanding of the art of our time. As a platform for exposure, education, and experimentation, the Museum inspires new ideas and new ways of being through an endless rotation of transformative, relevant, and pioneering exhibitions and programs designed to elevate and empower all by cultivating discerning visual thinkers and ethical citizens.
Bistro at Sarasota Art Museum is located on the Museum’s campus in Paul Rudolph’s Sarasota School of Architecture 1959 Vocational Shops building. The Bistro fare is inspired by Florida’s regional fruit stands and farmer’s markets and emphasizes local produce, healthy proteins, and artisanal specialty items brought to you by Executive Chef and general manager Kaytlin Dangaran.
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