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EXHIBITIONS Highlights from The Ringling Collection of Modern and Contemporary Art |
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SHINIQUE SMITH: PARADE Through January 5, 2025 Original 21 Galleries This year-long, multi-gallery installation places the work of contemporary artist Shinique Smith (American, b. 1971) in direct dialogue with historic European art, a first in Smith’s career. Several of her large-scale sculptures, along with smaller works, will be displayed in the permanent collection galleries of the Museum of Art. Parade speaks to the European artistic tradition revealing the universality of human experience explored by artists throughout time while also foregrounding notions of Black femininity and the history of the circus. Shinique Smith: Parade is generously supported by the Ellin Family Art of Our Time Endowment Fund and the Ringling Museum General Development Fund. It is paid for in part by Sarasota County Tourist Development Tax revenues and by the Florida Department of State, Division of Arts and Culture. |
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Highlights from The Ringling Collection of Modern and Contemporary Art Through September 21, 2025 The figure is one of the oldest records of our existence as a species capable of storytelling; depictions of the human body constitute some of the oldest subjects in art. EMBODIED expands on the definition of the human figure by bringing together diverse representations in painting, sculpture, fiber, video, and mixed media by some of the most exciting artists working in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Highlights include mixed media work Still Life with Quilt and Drinking Gourds (2021) by William Villalongo, who merges tropes from the European still life painting tradition with elements from Black histories, pop culture, and mass media to bring awareness to “the body as an abstraction, one of resiliency and flux that rewrites itself as it moves through the world.” Also on view are Tony Tiger’s Time and Place: Egmont Key – Indian Territory – LA – Oklahoma (2019), the first abstract painting by a contemporary Native American artist acquired by The Ringling; and Cauleen Smith’s film Egungun: Ancestor Can’t Find Me (2017), which draws from the movement of Afrofuturism and borrows elements from an exquisitely layered Egungun (a costumed dancer who appears at celebrations for the dead in Yoruba societies) to acknowledge Florida’s fraught past. Additional important works address the formal elements of figurative art while exploring the artists’ inner psyche through portraiture and representation, including those by Benny Andrews, Marisol, Jessica Osceola, and Jake Troyli. Other works embody the artist’s personal experiences and broader observations on socio-political issues through abstraction and non-objective art—a type of abstract art that does not represent specific objects, people or other subjects found in the natural world—including those by Natasha Mazurka, Linda Stein, William Pachner, and Yuriko Yamaguchi.
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Photographs of the Traveling Circus and Carnival by Jill Freedman and Randal Levenson May 20, 2024 – August 25, 2024 Searing Galleries This exhibition features the work of two photographers, Jill Freedman and Randal Levenson, who entered the world of traveling entertainers—circus (for Freedman) and carnival (for Levenson)—in the 1970s. Their images reveal the distinct sensibilities each brought to their projects and offer a glimpse of what life was like on the road with the circus and carnival. For photographer Jill Freedman (American 1939-2019) the allure of the circus was one of wanderlust and the possibility of “packing up your tent and slipping into the night” in a world where the possibilities of true freedom felt increasingly foreclosed. The plucky photographer traveled with the Beatty-Cole Circus, documenting the “backstage everyday life of this ancient, closed society and the people who live in it” at a time when the traveling circus as a way of life was dying out. Freedman’s black and white images are gritty and offer up the tattered and hardscrabble aspects of life on the road, but she also homes in on the personalities and sense of community at the heart of circus life. Randal Levenson (American, 1946-2022) also went on the road, but he documented the unique world of traveling carnivals and sideshow performers beginning in 1971. Not merely a spectator, Levenson also immersed himself in the life and day-to-day work of the itinerant carnival, working alongside carnies to hammer in stakes and raise tents. In contrast to the grainier documentary approach that Freedman took, Levenson used a larger format camera on a tripod, posing his subjects and creating more formal compositions rich in tonalities, textures, and vivid details of his experiences. Jill Freedman’s photographs are part of The Ringling’s permanent collection and those by Levenson are generously leant by his widow, Rustin Levenson. This exhibition is curated by Christopher Jones, Stanton B. and Nancy W. Kaplan Curator of Photography and Media Art. |
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Boys & Girls Clubs of Manatee County May 19, 2024 – August 8, 2024 This Boys & Girls Clubs of Manatee County exhibition explores how we define, practice, and experience compassion and connection. Empathy, the word derived from the German Einfüling, which translates literally to in-feeling, is a nuanced idea, and this exhibition invites participants to consider their own understandings of it. What does it mean to recognize, share, and feel in the thoughts or experiences of another? Shared Vision: Art and Empathy is a reflection on the ways art can support empathic feeling and highlights the importance of empathy-building practices and affective learning strategies. Art can be an emotional necessity, a tool for communing with one’s self and others. It can also help us make sense of the complexities of the past and present, offering ways to imagine and adapt toward a different, hopeful and more just world. Shared Vision: Art and Empathy encourages active aesthetic and emotional engagement and considers the ways in which empathy can induce more socially conscious action in our communities. This is our open invitation to work together to build a stronger, collective culture of support and advocacy based in empathy, inclusion, and social impact. This is a collaborative project that actively embraces individual stories, open dialogue, and the diverse and rich lived experiences of each and every member of our global family. Acknowledgements Our heartfelt gratitude goes to the Sarasota/Gulf Coast Chapter of the American Sewing Guild, The Floyd C. Johnson and Flo Singer Johnson Foundation, The Ringling, and its extraordinary education department. A super special shout-out to Jackie Pettit, Kat Sjogren, Caitlyn Shanley, Judy Levine, Andy Salgado, and our teachers and community educators for providing capacity and insight to deepen student learning and for their commitment to encouraging creativity. The Ringling Community Gallery is always free and open to the public. The public exhibition space is located on the ground floor of the museum’s Ting Tsung and Wei Fong Chao Center for Asian Art. Those wishing to visit the exhibition should ask for a Community Gallery wristband at the Visitors Pavilion upon arrival at The Ringling. The Community Gallery is generously funded by The Community Foundation of Sarasota County. |
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Mountains of the Mind: Scholars’ Rocks from China and Beyond Through June 23, 2024 Chao Center for Asian Art, Pavilion Gallery Curious rocks have been venerated in China since ancient times. Wealthy elites of the Tang dynasty (618–907) sought out magnificent limestone boulders for their gardens. During the Song dynasty (960–1279), scholars began collecting smaller rocks with sculptural shapes, interesting surface textures, and striking colors. These became known as gonshi, meaning “spirit stones.” Because of their association with literati culture across East Asia, they are called “scholars’ rocks” in English. Suitable stones are harvested from lakes, riverbeds, mountains, and other remote locations, where they have been sculpted by the elements over millions of years. In the process of becoming scholars’ rocks, they may be cut from bedrock, trimmed, carved, polished, inscribed, and finally mounted in a custom-made stand at an angle that enhances their visual appeal. As such, scholars’ rocks are both natural objects and products of human creativity. Historically, connoisseurs displayed their stones in their studios alongside paintings, antique inkstones, archaic bronzes, and other treasures. They were admired for their abstract sculptural qualities, or alternatively, for their resemblance to human figures, animals, trees, or coiling clouds. Stones that suggest mountain peaks and powerful natural forces are especially revered among East Asian petraphiles. As objects of imaginative contemplation, these landscapes in miniature invite the mind to wander. For Daoists, mountains are the meeting place between heaven and earth. Ascending them brings one closer to the gods, while concealed beneath are great subterranean caverns inhabited by immortals. Even a small desktop rock could be a portal to another realm. Paintings of remarkable stones produced from the 8th century to the present reflect and reinforce the significance of rocks in East Asian culture. Their fantastic shapes invite the brush to play, and a skillful artist can animate their subjects or lend them magical qualities, such as the ability to shapeshift or generate their own weather. Petraphila is by no means unique to China, but the rich culture of appreciating scholars’ rocks that developed there has diffused across East Asia and beyond. As well as objects from China, this exhibition includes objects from Japan, Korea, Canada, and Italy. On view for the first time at The Ringling are scholars’ rocks recently donated from the extensive collection of Nancy and Stan Kaplan, a new acquisition funded by Lucia and Steven Almquist, and paintings on loan from the Dongguan Lou Collection. This exhibition is supported by the Chao Ringling Museum Endowment and the E. Rhodes and Leona B. |
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