Directors Tour
In Sarasota, where the conversation around art often extends beyond museum walls and into studios, classrooms, theaters and public spaces, seeing an exhibition with the person guiding its vision can c
By Edit Sarasota Staff
In Sarasota, where the conversation around art often extends beyond museum walls and into studios, classrooms, theaters and public spaces, seeing an exhibition with the person guiding its vision can change the way we look at it. Sarasota Art Museum’s Directors Tour offers that rare opportunity: an intimate walkthrough led by Executive Director Virginia Shearer, with the museum’s current exhibitions serving as both subject and starting point for a broader conversation about contemporary art.
Rather than moving through the galleries as a passive observer, visitors will be invited to look closely, ask questions and consider the decisions behind the museum’s presentation of each work. Shearer’s perspective can bring the connective tissue into focus—how artists’ ideas speak to one another, how a group of exhibitions takes shape and how the museum’s programming fits into Sarasota’s evolving cultural landscape.
That role matters in a city with a long artistic history and an increasingly ambitious contemporary scene. Sarasota has never lacked for institutions devoted to art, but the Sarasota Art Museum occupies a distinct place among them. Operated by Ringling College of Art and Design, the museum is housed in the former Sarasota High School, a landmark Mediterranean Revival building whose classrooms and corridors now hold ambitious exhibitions. The setting itself creates a productive tension: a historic civic structure reimagined as a space for new ideas, experimentation and close looking.
A director-led tour also offers a glimpse into the work that happens before an exhibition opens—research, selection, installation and the many layers of interpretation that shape a visitor’s experience. For longtime museumgoers, it may reveal fresh dimensions in familiar galleries. For those still finding their way into contemporary art, it provides a welcoming route in, grounded in conversation rather than expertise performed from a distance.
The Directors Tour takes place Monday, September 28, 2026, at Sarasota Art Museum, 1001 South Tamiami Trail in Sarasota. Led by Virginia Shearer, the program will feature a walkthrough of the museum’s current exhibitions and an opportunity to engage directly with the ideas animating this season’s presentation.