The Sarasota Art Museum has just opened "Skyway 2024: A Contemporary Collaboration" in concert with the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, the Tampa Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Art St. Petersburg and The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art.
More than 300 applicants responded to the museums’ collective call to artists for this prestigious triennial show.
“The curators from all of those wonderful museums partnered together to … curate an exhibition of more than 60 artists that are working and living locally and regionally. Between our museums, we’re each showing around 15 artists apiece,” said Sarasota Art Museum Executive Director Virginia Shearer.
She’s quick to add that the works on view at her museum are as compelling as they are diverse.
“Lots of different media, but also lots of different lived stories,” Shearer said. “That’s one of the things I love and value the most about working with contemporary art is getting to know the people and getting to know their life stories and feeling that our world is big and complex, but also interconnected, and I think you really achieve that by visiting ‘Skyway.’”
Although the work of the 14 artists featured by the Sarasota Art Museum is varied in style, media, scale, process and concept, viewers will find many connecting threads — pensive and poetic ruminations on the human connection with nature as well as on environmental issues; deep rootedness in their unique identity; probing investigations into their cultural heritage and immigrant experiences.
To see the entire collaboration, it would be necessary to visit all five museums as works on exhibit will not be rotated from museum to museum. But there’s plenty of time to catch all five shows as "Skyway 2024" runs now through October 27.
THE BACKGROUND:
In its third iteration, "Skyway" is a triennial exhibition celebrating the gamut of regional creativities and contemporary art practices flourishing in Hillsborough, Manatee, Pasco, Pinellas, and Sarasota counties.
Highlighting their recent work, Sarasota Art Museum will feature 14 artists working with a wide range of media and coming from different stages in their careers: Kim Anderson, Ryan Day, Sue Havens, Dominique Labauvie, Tatiana Mesa Paján, Samantha Modder, Roger Clay Palmer, Herion Park, Gabriel Ramos, Eszter Sziksz, Jill Taffet, Rob Tarbell, Kirk Ke Wang, and Willow Wells. Bios for each artist can be found at https://www.sarasotaartmuseum.org/skyway-2024-a-contemporary-collaboration/.
Some of the artists have exhibited in the previous "Skyway," while for others, it is their first time.
According to SAM’s website, “These artists explore individual lived experience that are simultaneously collective; they imaginatively and critically examine our surroundings and the commodities we consume, discard, and rediscover. Several engage with ever-changing digital technology. Throughout it all, they reveal their existence not merely as isolated individuals but also as parents, children, life partners, and citizens who are reflecting on this moment in historical time."
To read more stories about the arts in Southwest Florida, visit Tom Hall's website: SWFL Art in the News.