A New Festival Is Coming to Sarasota Next Year
A collaboration between Sarasota Rising, Embracing Our Difference and Selby Gardens' Historic Spanish Point campus is on tap for next year's Living Arts Festival.
Image: Everett Dennison
Sarasota Rising has announced a major collaboration for its Living Arts Festival, the weeklong interdisciplinary arts festival set for 2024. According to Sarasota Rising executive director Jeffery Kin, the festival’s first program will be a partnership with Marie Selby Botanical Gardens and the educational non-profit Embracing Our Differences called "Our Embrace Reimagined."
Intended to be a walking exhibit, art panels from this year’s Embracing Our Differences exhibition will be mounted at Selby Garden’s Historic Spanish Point campus for the event. In conjunction with the artwork, live performance pieces inspired by the panels will be created and performed by select smaller arts organizations live at the Spanish Point campus during the festival. Sarasota Rising is currently in talks with prospective performers.
“We're excited to have the Embracing Our Differences artwork repurposed in this meaningful way so that the messages of diversity, inclusion, kindness and respect can continue inspiring others,” says Sarah Wertheimer, executive director of Embracing Our Differences.
The involvement from Selby Gardens, meanwhile, provides an opportunity for those in the arts community who are not often given a big platform a way to showcase their talents on a larger scale.
Sarasota has hosted arts festivals before, the most prominent among them being the Ringling International Arts Festival, which brought artists from around the world to the grounds of the Ringling Museum each fall for almost a decade before the museum switched gears to year-round programming efforts. But the focus of the Living Arts Festival is to engage local arts organizations, big and small, in presenting multiple performances for audiences of all ages and interests.
“It’s a culmination of what Sarasota Rising is all about, a celebration of inclusion and diversity in our community,” says Sarasota Rising’s executive director, Jeffery Kin. “We’re bringing together the arts in an exciting and collaborative new way.”
More details about Sarasota Rising and the Living Arts Festival are forthcoming; we'll keep you posted as we learn more. For more information, click here.
