Sarasota Art Museum

ABOUT THIS PLACE

The museum opened on December 14, 2019, at 1001 South Tamiami Trail, in what had been Sarasota High School. The original building, Late Gothic Revival in brick and terra cotta, was designed by M. Leo Elliott and finished in 1927, and it went on the National Register in 1984. Paul Rudolph, the central figure of the Sarasota School of Architecture, added a building in 1960, and his 1959 vocational shops now hold the cafe, so the campus is worth walking for the architecture alone. The museum works as a kunsthalle: it holds no permanent collection and mounts temporary exhibitions and site-specific installations instead, across 15,000 square feet on three floors, concentrating on twentieth and twenty-first century work. It operates in partnership with Ringling College of Art and Design and shares the site with the college's continuing studies program and the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. There are outdoor sculpture galleries and a shop