Curator’s Tour | Presence
In Sarasota, where light can turn an ordinary street corner into a study in color and shadow, photography has a particularly attentive audience.
By Edit Sarasota Staff
In Sarasota, where light can turn an ordinary street corner into a study in color and shadow, photography has a particularly attentive audience. A passing gesture, a weathered façade, a face caught between expressions—these are the details that ask us to slow down. Presence: The Photography Collection of Judy Glickman Lauder takes that invitation seriously, bringing together photographs that explore what it means to look closely at other people and at the world they inhabit.
The exhibition becomes richer in the company of someone who can open its visual and historical doors. During the Curator’s Tour, SAM’s Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art will lead visitors through Presence, offering context about the works, the collection, and the choices that shape the exhibition’s narrative. A curator’s perspective can transform a gallery visit from a sequence of individual impressions into a conversation: between generations of photographers, between documentary and art, and between the image in front of us and the lives it records.
That kind of looking has particular resonance in Sarasota, a city whose cultural life depends on the exchange between artists, institutions, collectors, and an unusually engaged public. Sarasota Art Museum, housed in the former Sarasota High School, has made a distinctive place for modern and contemporary art within the city’s historic center. Its exhibitions encourage visitors to approach familiar subjects from fresh angles, while its programs create room for questions that continue beyond the gallery.
Presence also speaks to the enduring power of a collection assembled with intention. Photography can preserve a moment, but it can also complicate it—asking viewers to consider who is visible, who is behind the camera, and what remains outside the frame. With a curator’s guidance, the exhibition’s title becomes less a statement than a method: an invitation to be fully present before the work.
The Curator’s Tour of Presence: The Photography Collection of Judy Glickman Lauder takes place Monday, October 19, 2026, at Sarasota Art Museum. For anyone interested in the stories photographs carry—and the many ways a museum can help us see them—the afternoon offers an opportunity to spend time with the collection at a thoughtful, unhurried pace.