Beginning in December, Museum open 7 days a week and Museum ‘Free Day’ moved to, and rebranded as, ‘Second Sundays @ SAM’
Sarasota, FL – November 19, 2021 – Sarasota Art Museum of Ringling College of Art and Designtoday announced details for the opening of Judith Linhares: The Artist as Curator, running from November 27, 2021 to April 3, 2022, as well as information on future exhibitions, expanded operating schedule, and new Museum initiatives. Beginning in December, the Museum will be open 7 days a week and Museum Free Day (supported by the Charles & Margery Barancik Foundation) moves to the 2nd Sunday of the month and has been rebranded as ‘Second Sundays @ SAM.’
“Our upcoming Judith Linhares: The Artist as Curator exhibition parts the curtain, with Linhares inviting us into her world – breaking the barrier between artist and viewer – by offering enthusiasts the opportunity to explore the influences that shape Linhares’ art,” stated Sarasota Art Museum Executive Director Virginia Shearer. “In addition to her art, Linhares will share the inner workings of her creative process: her studio space, dream journals and notebook pages, as well as external influences as evidenced through the five contemporary artists she has curated for this exhibition. We are excited to share Linhares’ insight into the identity of the artist and have this exhibition premiere our initiatives to break barriers and offer visitors the opportunity to engage with art in new and innovative ways.”
According to Linhares, “The now mythical model of the artist struggling alone in their garrets is not the full story and is a little out of date. The real story about how artists learn to make the work they need to make happens over time developing skills, cosmologies, philosophies, and whatever it takes to stay focused on their pursuit.”
Judith Linhares: The Artist as Curator is a collaborative exhibition between the artist and Museum composed of two elements that array throughout the entirety of the Museum’s second floor galleries. South galleries are dedicated to Linhares’ work from the 1980s forward and include ephemera, dream journals, and studio items; with North galleries encompassing the The Artist as Curator element, which explores Linhares’ curation of the work of five contemporary(?) artists.
“Through this exhibition, Sarasota Art Museum aims to make art experiences accessible to all visitors—despite background, personal identity, art historical knowledge, etc.,” said Museum Assistant Curator Emory Conetta. “The identity of the artist is often misrepresented. Artists are often treated as celebrities, or inspired geniuses, who exist in a realm of superiority. This notion creates a barrier between artist and viewer and makes understanding and appreciating art feel inaccessible unless the viewer is someone as studied and knowledgeable as the artist. This mythos of the artist is far from reality.”
The range of paintings in this exhibition reflects Linhares’ interests in narrative as a form of personal revelation, as in psychoanalysis or the so-called “talking cure” – the desire to achieve wholeness and peace by recognizing and bringing into consciousness conflicts that need to be resolved. Linhares’ process is set in motion by making conflicts visible, working with the idea of opposing elements—abstract and figurative, light and dark, conscious and unconscious.
Accompanying the artist’s paintings, items from Linhares’ studio, including collected objects, photographs, and journals, parallel to specific imagery and temperaments in the works, allowing us to imagine how she transposed these multifarious elements.
Linhares’ creative catalysts go beyond the studio space, as well, and into the greater dialogue and history of artmaking. Recognizing the importance of artist-to-artist communication, the exhibition highlights the works of five contemporary artists: Bill Adams, Ellen Berkenblit, Karin Davie, Dona Nelson, and Mary Jo Vath. Each artist represents a unique approach, with strong commitments to physical processes and explorations within representation and abstraction. The inclusion of these five artists serves to underscore their individual differences while reflecting Linhares’ common interests in the power of an intuitive process. In Linhares’ words, they “keep ideas alive that are part of my vocabulary.”
According to Linhares, “I have known the artists included in this exhibition and witnessed each of their unique paths over a period of twenty years or more. Their work takes different forms – free-standing paintings, shaped canvases, drawings, painting and ceramics, small and intimate works to large and aggressive works. What they have in common is a process that risks failure. The end product was not completely known in advance. They have all developed confidence through learning skills and disciplined thinking to arrive at their unique perspectives. I find their commitment to their work, the clarity of their thinking, and the presence and experience of their works encouraging for my development as an artist.”
Judith Linhares Biography
Judith Linhares (b. 1940, Los Angeles, CA) grew up cavorting among the beach towns and mountainsides of Southern California and studied art in Oakland, California during the political and social revolution of the 1960s. Her paintings, comprised of loose-limbed, unabashed women who climb, dig, ride naked on horseback and delight in drunken revelry, transpired out of an era of liberating changes catapulted by feminism, conceptual art and performance as practiced by Terry Fox and Linda Montano and the transgressive sentiments shared by underground cartoonists, Robert Crumb and S. Clay Wilson in the 1970s. Fueled by the permissive, psychedelic atmosphere of the decade, Linhares began to investigate the relationship between the conscious and unconscious and would continue to record her own dreams in journals for the next 50 years.
For Linhares, the elemental narratives of dreams, myths and fairy tales continue to provide inspiration for kaleidoscopic compositions that teeter between fantasy and reality. Her dream journals were recently acquired by the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C.
Linhares has been based in New York since 1979, following her inclusion in the seminal Bad Paintingexhibition, curated by Marcia Tucker at the New Museum, alongside fellow painters Charles Garabedian, Joan Brown, and Ed Carrillo. Linhares’ works have been acquired by numerous public collections including the Whitney Museum, New York, NY; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; The de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; The New Britain Museum of American Art, CT; the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA; and The Berkeley Museum of Art, CA. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and multiple grants from the National Endowments for the Arts, Linhares most recently won the prestigious 2017 Artist Award from the Artists’ Legacy Foundation. (Bio Sourced from Various Small Fires (VSF) Los Angeles, California and Seoul, South Korea.http://www.vsf.la/artist_post/judith-linhares/)
Artist as Curator Artists’ Biographies
Bill Adams’ (b. 1957, New York) multidisciplinary practice includes drawing, painting, and most recently, sculpture. While the works differ in material and appearance, they are united through Adams’ improvisational process. Curiously, what results from the artist’s spontaneous actions is a coexistence between works, a shared essence suggested by the unspoken language between characters. Adams describes these characters, most often animals, as Rorschach readouts of his own psychologies. The artist’s raw, unmediated energy, transferred from hands to object, can be felt in the frenzied, spirited lines and forms of these works.
Ellen Berkenblit’s (b. 1958, New Jersey) paintings do not foreground meaning or interpretation—each work is rather an exploration of line, color, surface, and composition. Certain symbols, such as the figure of a young girl or a leopard, do not have assigned meaning, whereas others infiltrate Berkenblit’s paintings from lived experience, such as stoplights and trucks. These symbols are not pre-planned, although they persist across paintings. Their presence emerges through Berkenblit’s transfer of energy from unconscious, to paint, to canvas. Without hesitation, Berkenblit builds on layers of painted color and form until the final image appears. This full embrace of the painting process is physical, honest, and limitless.
Karin Davie’s (b. 1965, Canada) paintings recapture the ambition of Abstract Expressionism and combine it with optical styles rooted in the 1960s and 1970s. The works have a conviction in the formal language of painting, and, at the same time, they embody the painter’s persona. They are humorous, lyrical, and autobiographical. Information is woven together from both the external and internal world, to create a dynamic field of exchange between representation and abstraction. These paintings embrace contradiction and are rich in associations.
Dona Nelson’s (b. 1947, Nebraska) paintings defy designation and convention—they are both flat surfaces and three-dimensional objects; abstract and figurative; spontaneous and contemplative. Nelson’s painting process is constantly evolving and flexible, much like the possibilities of the materials she works with. The works exhibited here exemplify Nelson’s two-sided paintings. Nelson’s creative process continues to be guided by unplanned events that occur in the course of making a painting. Paint, cheesecloth, muslin, and string act as equal parts to create texture, mass, and color. The final work often evolves over several months, emerging out of simultaneity of thought and ever-present, ever-changing, material facticity.
Mary Jo Vath (b. 1957, Illinois) has dedicated her painting practice to thorough examination and “re-presentation” of everyday objects that have been overlooked, abandoned, and dismissed. After staging the object in a neutral space in her studio, Vath intensely scrutinizes the object, painting almost completely from observation. This steadfast observation bridges the greater, common understanding of the object and the artist’s unconscious perceptions, through which Vath realizes the individual and actual reality of the object. The final work presents not only the object’s true being but also its symbolic meaning.
Fall / Winter 21-22 Exhibition Season
The Fall and Winter 2021-2022 exhibition season aims to dissolve some of the barriers people face in visiting and experiencing art museums through: exhibitions that invite visitors to engage with art in new ways through participation, exploration, and immersion; exhibitions that use unconventional and everyday materials that undermine notions of what defines art and how it is experienced; exhibitions that activate our senses beyond the typical sense of sight; and an exhibition (Felix Gonzalez-Torres’“Untitled” (L.A.)) that does not require Museum admission.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ “Untitled” (L.A.)
Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ “Untitled” (L.A.) aligns with the Museum’s mission to present exhibitions that encourage people to engage with art in new ways. “Untitled” (L.A.) is a unique exhibition because it activates all of our senses – sight: the work itself; touch: picking up and unwrapping the candy; hearing: the unwrapping of the cellophane wrapper; smell: of the candy; taste: enjoying the candy itself. Activating all of our senses allows for the deepest possible engagement with a work of art—it excites and opens the mind in various ways that just the act of looking does not for all people. Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ “Untitled” (L.A.) will be on view from November 27, 2021-May 15, 2022.
Danner Washburn’s Effigy : Hemric
The exhibition is centered around a constructed domestic space—a shelter of sorts—that is a manifestation of a Yadkin Valley (North Carolina) tobacco farmer named Hemric. The shelter is fabricated from found materials and objects from the Yadkin Valley region, including natural elements, such as branches and leaves, and commercial objects, such as tarps and plastic.
The exhibition is immersive, inviting visitors to enter the domestic space, which is sectioned off into rooms like a home. The exhibition will also activate visitors’ sense of smell with dried tobacco leaves, which help position visitors in the mindset, space, and culture of the tobacco farmer that the domestic space is fashioned off of. Danner Washburn’s Effigy : Hemric will be on view from December 11, 2021 – May 8, 2022.
Additional Museum Updates
Open 7 Days a Week
Beginning in December, Sarasota Art Museum will be open 7 days a week. Previously, the Museum was closed on Tuesdays. The first open Tuesday is December 7.
Second Sundays @ SAM
Free Day has moved to the 2nd Sunday of the month (from the last Sunday of the month), but the same engaging and explorative programs remain!
Second Sundays @ SAM programming includes: Musical Interludes on the Marcy & Michael Klein Plaza; Mary’s Front Porch storytelling performance for all ages where they can share their imagination and creativity; What’s Your Medium? is an intergenerational art activity for discovering various artistic mediums; and Ringling College Studio + Digital Arts Free Studio Day Activities.
Support for Second Sundays @ SAM is provided by the Charles & Margery Barancik Foundation.
Exhibition Images
Exhibition images are approved only for publication in conjunction with editorial review or news coverage of Sarasota Art Museum exhibitions and must include the full caption information adjacent to the image. Images may not be cropped or altered in any way or superimposed with any printing. Images are approved for use within the body of the article; cover use requires additional approval. Online images may be reproduced with resolution no greater than 72 dots per inch. High-resolution image files are available at https://bit.ly/3nsIfve
Mission
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 The 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 at Ringling College.
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.
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.
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 Kaytlin Dangaran.
Sarasota Art Museum offers stunning event spaces available for rent with catering provided by the Bistro and the Constellation Culinary team.
Sarasota Art Museum is located at 1001 South Tamiami Trail, Sarasota, Florida, 34236. To stay in the know, become a Sarasota Art Museum Member, sign up for Museum email updates, access our website at www.SarasotaArtMuseum.org, and follow us on Facebook and Instagram.
ADMISSION:
General Admission $15
Museum Members FREE
Under 17, accompanied by an adult Free
Cross College Alliance Students Free with ID
Veterans / Active Military Free with ID
MUSEUM HOURS:
Monday 10am to 5pm
Tuesday closed, (Beginning December 7, 2021, Open 10am to 5pm)
Shop + Bistro + Grounds Open
Wednesday 10am to 5pm
Thursday 10am to 5pm
Friday 10am to 5pm
Saturday 10am to 5pm
Sunday 11am to 5pm
BISTRO SHOP
Open Daily 9am to 3pm Monday – Saturday 10am to 5pm
Brunch – Sat. + Sun. 9am to 3pm Sunday 11am to 5pm