Sarasota Insider

Sarasota Museum of Art Halfway to $22-million Goal
By Charlie Huisking

On a brisk Saturday morning earlier this year, more than 100 people crowded into a classroom in the former Sarasota High School building to hear renowned installation artist Judy Pfaff give a talk.

Pfaff was captivating, funny and insightful in this Artmuse lecture , which was sponsored by the Sarasota Museum of Art. The audience was buzzing after she concluded. But no one was more exuberant than SMOA president Wendy Surkis. For while SMOA is in the conceptual stages now, the museum’s permanent home will soon be the red-brick, Gothic Revival-style high school building. This lecture was a hint of exciting things to come.

“This was the first time we used this building for an actual art program,” Surkis says. “It really gave people a preview of the depth and quality of what’s going to be happening once SMOA is up and running.”

SMOA was started in 2003 by 13 art patrons who felt Sarasota needed a museum of modern and contemporary art. Two years later, the organization merged with the Ringling College of Art and Design. Ringling will use the first and third floors of the 57,000-square-foot high school building for studios and classrooms for continuing education programs. The museum will take up the entire second floor.

The ADP Group of Sarasota won a design competition for the project. Its plan calls for an outdoor sculpture garden, a patio, a café and a 100-seat auditorium. Museum visitors will be able to look through large windows to watch art being created in the Ringling studios below. Initially, the museum will present touring exhibitions, though a permanent collection is a long-term goal.

This is a $22-million project, with $14 million budgeted for renovation and $8 million for an endowment fund.

Surkis says half the money has been raised—a laudable achievement in this economy. Both Surkis and Ringling College president Larry Thompson say they expect the museum to be open
by 2013.

“More people are getting involved,” Surkis says. “People get it; they see this as a great addition to life in Sarasota.”

Ginger Rogers’ Neighborhood

The title of Backwards In High Heels—the Ginger Musical refers to the famous observation that Ginger Rogers could do everything Fred Astaire did, and do it backwards in high heels. Rogers gets top billing in this show, which runs May 7-30 at the Asolo Rep. In fact, Astaire doesn’t even show up until the second act. The first act focuses on the relationship between Rogers and her tenacious, show biz-savvy mother, Lela.

“Ginger had already done 19 movies when she met Astaire; she was the bigger star,” says Michael Donald Edwards, the Asolo’s producing artistic director. “This production shows you the journey she took to get there. And it contains all the wonderful songs from the Astaire-Rogers musicals, as well as some original music. I love Ginger Rogers, and plenty of people in this city feel the same way.”

And Edwards says those too young to be aware of Rogers should come and learn “how she came to define what it meant to be a dancer, and what it meant to be a woman.”

Sarasota Music Festival Revives

In next month’s column, I’ll focus in depth on the Sarasota Music Festival, which presents the first of nine major concerts on June 3.

But I thought it was important to remind people now that the three-week chamber music festival, a staple of Sarasota’s cultural life for decades, will actually occur.

Last August, the management of the Sarasota Orchestra, which runs the event, announced that the festival would be on hiatus for a year while its future was evaluated. Management cited years of budget deficits and a 45 percent drop in attendance since 1997.

But thanks to a $250,000 grant from the Kaiserman Foundation (the late Jay and Becky Kaiserman were passionate supporters), the festival will go on. Sixty top music students from the United States and several foreign countries will be working with a stellar group of faculty artists. That roster will include returning favorites like pianist Susan Starr and cellist Timothy Eddy, as well as such newcomers as Alexander Kerr, former concertmaster of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam.