Sarasota, FL
The Ringling legacy runs through everything in Sarasota — the circus impresario's investment in art institutions made this Gulf Coast city into one of Florida's most serious cultural destinations. The Rosemary District's emerging creative corridor hosts the most concentrated contemporary mural work, while St. Armands Circle's upscale retail district commissions work that balances accessibility with ambition.
Featured Artists
All artists →Andrew Hem
Cambodian-American artist Andrew Hem's dreamlike figurative work, inflected by his family's experience as refugees, found a natural home in Sarasota's Ringling legacy. "Ringling Legacy" in the Rosemary District depicts a tightrope walker suspended in Hem's characteristic twilight palette — lavender, dusty rose, and deep indigo — the wire becoming a thread connecting the circus performer to the stars above Sarasota Bay.
Conor Harrington
Irish painter Conor Harrington makes large-scale work that collides the formal conventions of 17th-century European painting — battle scenes, heroic poses, chiaroscuro — with the gestural marks and drips of contemporary abstraction. "Gulf Glow" on St. Armands Circle depicts a figure in colonial-era dress standing in Gulf of Mexico shallows at sunset, the classical portraiture dissolving into the kind of atmospheric sfumato that a Gulf sunset actually produces.
Curiot
Mexico City artist Francisco Morales (Curiot) creates murals populated by fantastical hybrid creatures drawn from pre-Columbian mythology, Day of the Dead iconography, and his own invented cosmology. "Circus Town" in the Rosemary District reworks the Ringling Brothers circus as a cast of Curiot's mythological animals — a skeleton acrobat, a jaguar aerial artist, a feathered serpent ring master — in a Day of the Dead tribute to Sarasota's founding performance tradition.