Sarasota Art Museum Announces its 2025-2026 Season Exhibition Schedule

Upcoming exhibitions feature works by internationally and nationally renowned artists as well as emerging talents

Janet Echelman (American). Study (Butterfly Rest Stop 1/9 scale), Rome, Italy, 2022.
Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Giovanni DeAngelis.

SARASOTA, Fla. (April 22, 2025) – Sarasota Art Museum of Ringling College of Art and Design (SAM) announces its 2025-2026 season, featuring a lineup of eight exhibitions including works by such acclaimed artists as Janet Echelman, Louise Bourgeois, Chuck Close, Ai Weiwei, Maria Guzmán Capron, Sol LeWitt, and others. Additionally, the Museum will present a showcase of rare Art Deco posters from the Crouse Collection, shining a spotlight on the artform as Art Deco celebrates its centennial anniversary.

The Season opens with Jillian Mayer: Slumpies on May 4, 2025. Multiple large outdoor sculptures invite viewers to sit, climb, curl up, and slump on these colorful pieces while using their technological devices. Mayer, a multimedia artist, is interested in the effect technology usage has on our bodies. These Slumpies have been intentionally designed to offer the human body places of additional physical support while navigating the online world.

Next is Lillian Blades: Through the Veil, beginning June 1, 2025. In her first solo museum exhibition, Blades invites visitors to step inside a kaleidoscope of color, form, and texture as they wander through an immersive labyrinth of mixed-media “veils.” The Atlanta-based artist draws inspiration from her island upbringing in The Bahamas as well as her late mother’s legacy to explore themes of memory, self-discovery, and cultural identity in this new installation.

A. M. Cassandre, L'Intransigeant, 1925.
Collection of the Crouse Family. Image credit: Courtesy of Poster House.

Beginning August 31, 2025, SAM celebrates the 100th anniversary of the Art Deco movement with Art Deco: The Golden Age of Illustration. This show features 70 rare posters from the Crouse Collection created by some of the world’s most famous graphic designers active during the 1920s and 1930s. In addition to these iconic posters, selected sculptural works from the Crouse Collection and Art Deco furniture on loan from the Wolfsonian Museum at Florida International University in Miami further conjure the era’s design aesthetic.

“Art Deco posters of this quality are now extremely rare and are highly valued works of art that one would expect to see at major American and European museums,” shared Executive Director Virginia Shearer. “As part of Ringling College of Art and Design, we especially appreciate these works for the artistic and historic significance they carry in terms of the evolution of graphic design, illustration, and typography. These works are stand-out examples of the essential role art played during the burgeoning age of advertising and continues to play today.”

Also opening on August 31, 2025 is Selina Román: Abstract Corpulence, highlighting new works that blend photography, abstraction, and self-portraiture to explore themes of beauty and the politics of size. Beginning November 16, 2025, SAM debuts Janet Echelman: Radical Softness, a rare retrospective look at the award-winning and internationally recognized artists’ artistic evolution. Tracing Echelman’s journey from early explorations in drawing, painting, and textiles to the monumental, netted sculptures that have redefined public spaces around the world, this exhibition contextualizes the artist’s practice and reveals the narratives, influences, and processes that drive her work. 

“Janet Echelman is a globally recognized name in the contemporary art world,” said Shearer. “Her works, often the size of multiple city blocks, have become permanent fixtures in public spaces everywhere from Singapore, Sydney, Beijing, Boston, New York, and elsewhere. Many SAM visitors will be familiar with Echelman’s work, having seen her outdoor sculpture Bending Arc at St. Petersburg’s waterfront Pier where it was installed in 2020. SAM’s exhibition is special because it goes deeper into Echelman’s creative journey than most exhibitions highlighting the artist. If you’ve seen exhibitions featuring Janet Echelman’s work in the past, you will experience something new through Radical Softness.”

Museum visitors will experience a rare glimpse into private collections held throughout Southwest Florida with Something Borrowed, Something New, beginning April 19, 2026. Featuring works by such legendary artists as Louise Bourgeois, Chuck Close, Yoko Ono, David Hockney, Ai Weiwei, and more, this exhibition features work across a wide range of media produced by some of the most prominent artists of our time. Complementing these borrowed sections, this curation also features new pieces, fostering an artistic dialogue between the 20th-century icons and artists making work today.

Opening April 19, 2026, is an exhibition of new works by Maria A. Guzmán Capron. In this solo exhibition, Capron explores the complexities of identity through vibrant figurative textiles. Made from a wide array of fabrics, these patchwork portraits ask viewers to reflect on the way their own identities have been stitched together over time.

Maria A. Guzmán Capron. Eros, 2022.
Fabric, thread, batting, stuffing, spray paint and acrylic paint, 81 x 87 x 1 1/2 in. Courtesy of the artist and Nazarian / Curcio.

The 2025-2026 Season will come to a close with Beautiful Ideas: The Prints of Sol LeWitt, opening May 17, 2026.  Regarded as one of the founders of both minimalism and conceptual art, Sol LeWitt (1928-2007) generated more than 350 print projects during his 40-year artistic career. This exhibition, organized by the New Britain Museum of American Art, features over 100 of those prints, beginning with LeWitt’s earliest works and extending through his mature expressions in abstraction.

From legends like Ai Weiwei, Chuck Close, Louise Bougeois, and Sol LeWitt to up-and-coming artists Lillian Blades and Selina Román, this season’s curation reflects SAM’s commitment to presenting pioneering modern and contemporary exhibitions that foster appreciation and understanding of the art of our time.

A full Season schedule with more details follows this release.

Sarasota Art Museum’s 2025-2026 Exhibition Season:

Jillian Mayer: Slumpies

May 4, 2025-August 19, 2026

Jillian Mayer explores our ever-increasing relationship with technology and the impact device usage has on our bodies through her interactive sculpture series, Slumpies. Blurring the line between fine art and functional objects, Slumpies invites viewers to sit, climb, slump and curl up, using the sculptures much like furniture. In doing so, visitors explore how Mayer’s objects provide support for the various postures we assume while using technology. With bulky, abstract forms and brightly colored palettes, the construction of these sculptures stands in stark contrast to the sleek aesthetic of today’s increasingly tech-driven world. Experience Mayer’s Slumpies and discover thoughtful, human-centered design and a place of comfort for bodies using devices.

Jillian Mayer: Slumpies is presented as part of Sarasota Art Museum’s Inside Out exhibition program.

Lillian Blades: Through the Veil
June 1-October 26, 2025

Step into the labyrinth with Lillian Blades: Through the Veil. In this engaging exhibition, Blades invites visitors to enter, wander through and lose themselves within an immersive maze of “veils.” These radiant, mixed-media tapestries suspended from the ceiling shimmer with reflective surfaces, activating the space with bouncing light and color. Densely layered and immense in scale, Blade’s works combine handcrafted and found objects—picture frames, found imagery, wood, acrylic, and glass—wired together into a seismic and mesmerizing display. The result is an enveloping installation that winds its way through questions relating to memory, connection, self-discovery and cultural identity.

Lillian Blades: Through the Veil is organized by Sarasota Art Museum of Ringling College of Art and Design and curated by Lacie Barbour, associate curator of exhibitions at Sarasota Art Museum.

Art Deco: The Golden Age of Illustration

August 31, 2025-March 29, 2026

Sarasota Art Museum shines a spotlight on Art Deco as the art form celebrates its centennial anniversary. Art Deco: The Golden Age of Illustration showcases 70 rare posters from the Crouse Collection created by some of the world’s earliest, master graphic designers during the 1920s and 1930s.

During the 1920s, a bold new artistic style roared to life: Art Deco. This exciting, dramatic, and glamorous new genre bid farewell to the soft, organic forms of Art Nouveau and soon took the world by storm. One of Art Deco’s most significant contributions was the art of printed graphics, giving birth to the disciplines of illustration and typography that permeate our world today. 

Featuring subjects that range from automobiles, airlines, and ocean liners to drinks and tobacco, the works represented in Art Deco: The Golden Age of Illustration celebrate modernity, dynamism, and luxury—the dreams and desires of the turbulent early 20th-century. 

In addition to the iconic posters, Art Deco: The Golden Age of Illustration conjures the era’s design aesthetic with selected sculptural works and cocktail shakers from the Crouse collection and Art Deco furniture pieces on loan from the Wolfsonian Museum at Florida International University in Miami.

Featured poster designers include Lester Beall, Leonetto Cappiello, Jean Carlu, A. M. Cassandre, Paul Colin, Austin Cooper, Jules Courvoisier, Edward McKnight Kauffer, Charles Loupot, Leo Marfurt, Gert Sellheim, Federico Seneca and Roger de Valerio.

Art Deco: The Golden Age of Illustration 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.

Selina Román: Abstract Corpulence
August 31, 2025-March 29, 2026

New works by Selina Román blend photography, abstraction, and self-portraiture to explore themes of beauty and the politics of size in Selina Román: Abstract Corpulence. Roman’s photographs feature tightly cropped images of the artist’s own body, boldly occupying the full composition and extending past the boundaries of each frame. Pastel bodysuits and tights transform the artist’s flesh into new, gently rolling landscapes as amorphous shapes converge to create modernist-inspired compositions. At this scale, Roman’s tightly cropped portrayals of stomachs, thighs and hips become formal studies of line, shape and color, asking viewers to consider the human form from a point of true abstraction. The softly hued palette created by the artist’s bodysuits lends itself to narratives around the aesthetics of femininity. Displayed as a colorful never-before-seen installation, Roman’s photographs transform the gallery into a space of quiet resistance, subverting traditional ideas of feminine beauty.

Selina Román: Abstract Corpulence 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.

Janet Echelman: Radical Softness
November 16, 2025-April 26, 2026

Award-winning and internationally recognized artist Janet Echelman sculpts at the scale of buildings and city blocks. Her work defies categorization, intersecting sculpture, architecture, urban design, material science, structural and aeronautical engineering and computer science.

Radical Softness offers a rare look into Echelman’s artistic evolution from early explorations in drawing, painting, and textile methods to the iconic, monumental netted sculptures that have redefined public spaces around the world. Learn about the narratives, influences and processes that have driven the artist’s prolific career. At its core, this exhibition highlights Echelman’s use of softness as a powerful tool, both in materials and philosophy. Showcasing a selection of works from across all four decades of her path-breaking career, Radical Softness reveals how an artist’s work can bring people together and carve out space for reflection in an ever-changing world.

Janet Echelman: Radical Softness is organized by Sarasota Art Museum of Ringling College of Art and Design and curated by Lacie Barbour, associate curator of exhibitions at Sarasota Art Museum.  

Something Borrowed, Something New
April 19, 2026-September 27, 2026

Featuring works by such acclaimed modern and contemporary artists as Louise Bourgeois, Chuck Close, Yoko Ono, David Hockney, Ai Weiwei and more, this never-before-seen exhibition offers a rare glimpse into private collections held throughout Southwest Florida. From paintings, sculptures and prints to photographs and video works, Something Borrowed, Something New showcases a diverse range of artworks produced by some of the most prominent artists of our time. Complementing these borrowed selections, this show also features exciting new pieces and creates a dialogue between the works of late 20th-century trailblazers and today’s leading global artists. Together, this curation celebrates our region’s passion for the visual arts with extraordinary artworks never to be exhibited side-by-side again.

Something Borrowed, Something New 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.

Maria A. Guzmán Capron: New Works
April 19, 2026-September 27, 2026

Maria A. Guzmán Capron explores the complexities of identity through her vibrant figurative textiles in a new solo exhibition. Born in Milan, Italy, to Peruvian and Colombian parents and later relocating to Texas as a teenager, the California-based artist understands first-hand the challenges of toggling between different cultures and geographies. Capron channels these personal experiences into her artwork, creating layered portraits of exuberant, multi-faceted characters. Common materials like cotton join with luxurious fabrics such as silk to explore power dynamics and hierarchies within society today. Through her use of various fabrics, Capron asks viewers to consider the way our own identities have been stitched together over time—beautiful, ever-evolving collages of ancestry, culture and life experiences. Capron’s plush, flowing figures merge, embrace and spill into one another, inviting us to recognize ourselves in others, see others within ourselves, and find comfort and beauty in being “in between.”

This exhibition is organized by Sarasota Art Museum of Ringling College of Art and Design and curated by Lacie Barbour, associate curator of exhibitions at Sarasota Art Museum.

Beautiful Ideas: The Prints of Sol LeWitt
May 17, 2026-October 25, 2026

Regarded as one of the founders of both minimalism and conceptual art, Sol LeWitt (1928-2007) is best known for his large-scale wall drawings and modular structures. Alongside these works, LeWitt generated more than 350 print projects during his 40-year artistic career, including thousands of lithographs, silkscreens, etchings, aquatints, woodcuts and linocuts. Printmaking proved to be the perfect medium for LeWitt’s brand of conceptual art, in which the “idea becomes a machine that makes the art.” Beautiful Ideas: The Prints of Sol LeWitt explores the artist’s extensive body of prints, beginning with his earliest works and extending through his mature expressions in abstraction. Organized in four thematic sections—”Lines, Arcs, Circles, and Grids,” “Bands and Colors,” “From Geometric Figures to Complex Forms,” and “Wavy, Curvy, Loopy Doopy, and in All Directions”—the exhibition reflects the bold geometric shapes and precise lines that defined LeWitt’s artistic style.

Beautiful Ideas: The Prints of Sol LeWitt is organized by the New Britain Museum of American Art and curated by David S. Areford, professor of art history at the University of Massachusetts Boston. The exhibition includes 41 objects, consisting of single prints and print series, for a total of over 100 prints.  

 

A related scholarly publication, Sol LeWitt: Strict Beauty, is available, produced in 2020 by the New Britain Museum of American Art, Williams College Museum of Art, and Yale University Press.

 

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.

Sarasota Art Museum is Ringling College of Art and Design’s dynamic laboratory for the exploration and advancement of contemporary art. Sarasota Art Museum shares the Ringling College Museum Campus with Ringling College’s Continuing Studies program comprised of the non-credit Studio and Digital Arts program and the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at Ringling College.
Located in the historic Sarasota High School, Sarasota Art Museum opened to the public in 2019 in the beautifully reimagined building by K/R Architects. The new Museum is comprised of 15,000 square feet of dedicated exhibition space, a plaza court, the Great Lawn featuring temporary sculpture and site – specific installations, Bistro, and SHOP.
As Sarasota’s only museum solely focused on contemporary artists and their work, Sarasota Art Museum offers visitors a place to see thought-provoking exhibitions and participate in education programs that start conversations and amplify the city’s creative spirit.
SHOP, located in the Museum’s lobby, features an eclectic collection of exhibition-related merchandise, art and architecture books, contemporary jewelry, and gifts.

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.

ADMISSION:

General Admission                                             

$15

 

Museum Members                                             

Free

 

Youth (17 and under)                                         

Free  

 

Active Military & Veterans (with ID)                 

Free

 

Ringling College Alumni                                 

Free

 

Ringling College Faculty, Staff,                         

& Students (includes one guest)

Free

 

Cross College Alliance Students (with ID)     

Free 

 

MUSEUM HOURS: 

Open 7 days a week 

Monday-Saturday: 10 am to 5 pm  

Sunday: 11 am to 5 pm 

 

SHOP 

Monday-Saturday: 10 am to 5 pm  

Sunday: 11 am to 5 pm 

 

BISTRO  

Open Daily: 9 am to 3 pm 

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