After 43 years in the heart of downtown Sarasota, Art Uptown Gallery will permanently close Saturday, August 26th at 5:00PM.
The artists of Art Uptown Gallery, and those working in the Studios upstairs, were afforded the opportunity to thrive and serve art-loving tourists and locals. They are forever grateful for the generosity of the previous landlords, the Heritage family, who valued the importance of the arts in our town by keeping the rent affordable for working artists.
“The building has been sold, and the gallery was unable to negotiate a lease price that would allow us to continue,” comments gallery board president Melanie Carlstein. Like many other local galleries and arts organizations, Art Uptown has fallen prey to the changing priorities of real estate investors and the challenging atmosphere of support for the visual arts.
It has been the artists’ pleasure to create, serve, and be part of your lives during their time on Main Street. It is your enthusiasm and loyalty that allowed the gallery to be a part of the community. They will all sorely miss the relationships they have created over the years.
The artists will stock the gallery with “many works of art to give the public a final opportunity to find art they love. We hope the public will stop in to see us, our work, and to say goodbye,” states Carlstein.
The gallery encourages the public to follow and support Art Uptown artists as they find new places to present their work. Share your information with the gallery to pass on to artists in whom you are interested. You can find individual artist’s information on the Art Uptown website until the end of the month or by searching by artist name, online. We all look forward to continuing our relationships and creating new work.
We thank you for your support and friendship.