When thousands of arts lovers converged on the Ringling Museum grounds for the inaugural Ringling International Arts Festival this past October, it was an exciting new celebration, bringing innovative dance, theater and music performers from around the world and visitors, including festival partner Mikhail Baryshnikov, from many points out of town. And it was also a happy confirmation of something Sarasota has always known: that we are, in fact, a cultural center worth reckoning with.

The festival, a labor of many months between the museum, the Baryshnikov Arts Center, Florida state government and the Sarasota Convention and Visitors Bureau (with many proud local sponsors), was a significant indication that when it comes to the claim of being Florida’s cultural capital, Sarasota is not about to surrender the title. In truth, from early fall through late spring, almost any week in Sarasota is a festival of the arts, with so many offerings in theater, dance, visual arts and more that even the most ardent fan can only experience a sliver of the cultural pie. Indeed, the arts have traditionally been as much a draw here for part-and full-time residents as our beaches, weather and sporting opportunities.

Arts boosters usually point to John Ringling as being the visionary who started the cultural ball rolling here. The circus king, who had as keen an eye for art as he did for promotion and real estate, was determined to leave his mark on Sarasota and to attract wealthy, cultured visitors from all over the world to view his impressive collection of fine paintings, sculpture and decorative arts.

To that end, he built, beside the mansion where he and wife Mable lived in splendor, a grandly conceived museum along the bayfront—a museum he eventually left to the people of Florida in his will. The museum first briefly opened its doors in 1931; but that was a bit of a false start, as the Depression of the 1930s brought both Ringling and Sarasota financial troubles that made it impossible to keep the museum open consistently. Starting in the mid-’40s, the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art welcomed visitors on a more regular basis. Splendidly expanded and renovated in 2007, the Ringling is now one of the 20 largest museums in North America and includes museums of the circus and the Ringling mansion on its bayfront campus.

Other arts organizations and creative types followed Ringling’s lead. Both the Players of Sarasota, the area’s first community theater, and Art Center Sarasota, a members’ organization that presented shows and artistic get-togethers, had also been birthed well before the 1940s,
for example.

But it was the post-World War II boom that put Sarasota solidly on the cultural map. Chalk it up to a combination of easier transit to and from Florida from up North, the critical mass of veterans on the move, and the always appealing allure of Sarasota beachfront living. It was during this era that Sarasota’s reputation as an artist’s and writer’s colony, particularly on the beckoning barrier island of Siesta Key, really began to rise.

We still like to point to Sarasota as an artists’ colony, but in the 1940s, ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, before even more rapid growth began to swell our population, this truly was a comfortably cozy seaside town where painters, sculptors, writers and performers gathered, sharing both professional and personal interests and friendships. The list of names of creators who have spent time here (some for decades) and brought their creative energies with them is an extensive one: writers John D. MacDonald, MacKinlay Kantor, Stuart Kaminsky, Stephen King, John Jakes; visual artists Syd Solomon, Jimmy Ernst, David Budd, Conrad Marca-Relli, John Chamberlain, Richard Anuskiewicz; and musicians Eric von Schmidt, Brian Johnson and Dickie Betts among them.

And then there are the artists, both on stage and behind the scenes, who have brought their talents to bear not only individually, but as part of our thriving theatrical, dance and music scene. Take, for example, the Asolo Repertory Theatre and the Sarasota Opera, both of whom have recently celebrated 50 years of bringing us live performances. The Asolo Rep began its days as a summer theater festival headlined by faculty and students from Florida State University, performing Restoration-era comedies and the like in the small jewel box of a theater brought to the United States from Italy by early Ringling Museum director and theater lover Everett “Chick” Austin. The 18th-century theater was the perfect setting for those early period productions (today it has been lovingly restored and remains a home for theater, concerts and other cultural offerings on the museum grounds).

The Asolo Rep grew into a year-round rotating repertory company that proved fertile ground for such up-and-coming stars as Polly Holliday, Sharon Spelman and Isa Thomas. As it expanded into a new home at the FSU Center for the Performing Arts and gained more of a national reputation, it’s continued to present top-quality performances, sometimes with blockbuster musicals to open the fall season, while the rotating rep in winter and spring gives audiences the chance to see as many as four or five plays during a span of just a week or so.

The company also helped give birth to what was then the Asolo Opera and what eventually became the Sarasota Opera, now in its own recently renovated 1920s-era theater downtown. Today Sarasota Opera is known far and wide for the quality of its productions, which are staged with painstaking attention to the composer’s original intention. Opera lovers from around the country and even from abroad plan Sarasota vacations around the opera’s schedule.

Other now venerable institutions sprang to life in the 1940s, ’50s, ’60s and after, including the Sarasota Orchestra (formerly the Florida West Coast Symphony), which presents a full complement of classical, chamber and pops music year-round; the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall, an “only in Sarasota” seashell-shaped hall that this year celebrates its 40th season of bringing top performers in every discipline to local audiences; the Sarasota Film Society, indulging our thirst for non-mainstream movies with screenings at its quaint Burns Court Cinema downtown and a new theater in Lakewood Ranch; and, in the ’80s, the Sarasota Ballet, which presents both classical and contemporary choreography with a talented young company of dancers (dancers an influential New York Times critic praised for their “speed, charm, full-bodied immersion and multifaceted detail” after one performance in 2008).

The list goes on: Venice Theatre, now marking its 60th year of presenting community theater to south county residents; the Golden Apple Dinner Theatre, a downtown mainstay; and Florida Studio Theatre, where three stages and a highly regarded educational program challenge and intrigue audiences and participants of all ages.

But perhaps the most telling examples of Sarasota’s inexhaustible artistic energy come with additions to the scene that demonstrate how one or two or a dozen people with a dream can bring it to fruition. Whether you’re talking about the Sarasota Film Festival, now in its 12th year of showing new and independent films to a hungry viewing audience; the Jazz Club of Sarasota, conceived in a living room and now almost 30 years into presenting one of America’s unique art forms; or the buzz of a more recent arrival like Fuzión Dance Artists, the brainchild of two young choreographers bursting to share their passion with others, the beat goes on.

Even in the recent tough economic times, that turns out to be true. The Ringling College of Art and Design, an institution dating back to the early 1930s, has charged ahead in the past few years, adding new buildings to its campus, attracting record numbers of students from around the globe, and steadily increasing the disciplines—including such hot new fields as computer animation and game design—those young talents can study. Graduates from the Ringling and other visual artists who’ve decided to make their home here are also finding new ways to exhibit and sell their work outside of the traditional gallery system, forming nonprofit entities like the new s/ART/q, which plans regular shows and collaboration among working artists to share both studio and exhibition spaces. And organizers are hoping to open a contemporary museum with changing world-class exhibitions, the Sarasota Museum of Art, in a landmark building (the old Sarasota High School) within a few years.

As if all that weren’t enough, the Sarasota Convention and Visitors Bureau is currently at work on a business plan to present yet another cultural festival next fall—another attempt to both showcase what we have to offer here and to drive the cultural tourism that is so crucial to our economy. It all lends hope for the health and vigor of our artistic future—a belief that, as Al Jolson famously said in Hollywood’s first talking film, “You ain’t heard nothing yet.” z