Arts & Culture Magazine - March/April 2008 - (Page 53) By Chris Angermann Fine Arts Society of Sarasota m any visitors to the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall enjoy the collection of paintings and sculptures on display, but few realize that they owe their aesthetic pleasure to the Fine Arts Society of Sarasota. Indeed, the society is one of the Gulf Coast’s better kept secrets. Yet it has been a steady force in the local arts scene for nearly 40 years. Besides owning and maintaining the collection, it awards scholarships, grants and prizes every year and engages in a variety of educational programs and projects. “Our primary mission is to support the art community in Sarasota,” says Joan Endrizzi, co-president of the board of directors. Founded in 1969, the Fine Arts Society quickly acquired an eclectic assortment of paintings and sculpture by Florida artists, many of them donated by members and the artists themselves. The following year, it made an arrangement with the Van Wezel to put the collection on display there, and the fruitful relationship has continued ever since. Over time, the collection has grown to 49 pieces, covering a wide range of styles and media—oil, acrylics, pastel, watercolors, paper, wood, metal and glass. The catalogue reads like a Who’s Who of the area’s finest visual artists, going all the way back to the 1930s when John Ringling brought some of them to Sarasota to teach at his new school for the arts, now the Ringling College of Art and Design. All of the artists in the collection have spent some, if not all, of their career in Florida. You can enjoy impressionist paintings like Helen Sawyer’s “Summer” and abstract pieces like Syd Solomon’s “Stravinsky.” There is a beachscape by Ben Stahl, a portrait by Thornton Utz, and there are two sensuous wood sculptures by Thomas Williams. Some of the artists attained international stature. John Corbino is represented with Refugees, one of a series of “disaster” paintings done in the 1930s. Several others hang in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Richard Anuskiewicz, one of the great practitioners of optical art, has a two piece silk screen work in the collection, Red to Blue Portal Blue to Red Portal. The Fine Arts Society is always looking for new works. It acquired its latest painting in October—a vibrant, abstract, 8-by-12 foot canvas by Steven McCallum called Turgid Prominence. Usually the acquisition committee goes out to look for possible contenders, which SUMMER . Helen Sawyer www.artsandculturemag.com arts and culture magazine : : 53 http://www.artsandculturemag.com
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