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New Sarasota Art Museum exhibit invites discussion about race

The works will be on display through the fall.
Credit: Joshua White
Robert Colescott, 1919, 1980, Acrylic on canvas, 71 3/4 x 83 7/8 inches © 2021 The Robert H. Colescott Separate Property Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo Credit: Joshua White

SARASOTA, Fla. — The Sarasota Art Museum is bringing conversations about race to the forefront with a new exhibit opening on May 29.

"Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott" will showcase 50 total works from Robert Colescott's 53-year career. The museum says the artwork created by "one of America's most compelling and controversial artists" will bring both diversity and racial stereotypes to the surface, while also challenging them.

“Given the crisis of race relations, image management, and political manipulation in the current American—indeed the global—landscape,” Curator Lowery Stokes Sims said. “Colescott’s perspectives on race, life, social mores, historical heritage, and cultural hybridity allow us a means—if we are up to the task—to forthrightly confront what the state of world culture will be in the next decade.”

The museum says Colescott's interest in critiquing the failure to accurately represent the Black experience in art was the root of his life's work.

“Colescott’s exploration of race, identity, and politics is as pointed and pertinent now as ever and will help catalyze public discussion of pressing issues we are facing as a society,” said Platow. “In presenting the full-sweep of Colescott’s career, our goal is to also assert his seminal contributions to both post-War American art and to contemporary artists today working in the U.S. and internationally.”

You can catch the exhibit said to explore the reality of the "American Dream" at the Sarasota Art Museum from May 29 - Oct. 31. 

Joining Colescott's exhibit for a stint in the Tampa Bay area will also be "Charles McGill: In the Rough."

Charles McGill, in addition to being an artist, was a golf teaching professional whose two passions joined forces in his assemblage works that re-purposed elements of vintage golf bags. 

According to the museum, he re-imagined the materials into abstract sculptures that look to spark discussion on exclusion, privilege and racial and class inequities.

You can catch the exhibit at the Sarasota Art Museum from May 29 - Nov. 14. 

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