Raised in Sarasota by a single mother, Katherine Ceaser’s first encounters with fine art came on school field trips. As a girl, she wandered museums and galleries with her class, drawn to bursts of color and form that suggested other possibilities.
Those early encounters left a mark.
Decades later, Ceaser is now the executive director of Art Center Sarasota and charged with guiding the institution into its next century. The center turns 100 next year, and as she prepares for the milestone, Ceaser brings with her a conviction formed in childhood — that art must remain open to the community, regardless of background or income.
“Growing up was a very different experience than I think most people think of in Sarasota, so I’m very sensitive to making sure that the best parts of Sarasota are still accessible to everyone,” said Ceaser, who started at the center in September 2023 and stepped into the executive director position this past December.
“That’s a personal kind of guiding principle of mine.”
As Sarasota’s oldest arts organization, the Art Center has long nurtured emerging local talent through juried exhibitions, community workshops and scholarship programs, yet it often remains overshadowed by the city’s higher-profile arts venues.
Its centennial is a chance to step out of that shadow, with ambitious programming that spans retrospectives on its legacy, exhibitions by up-and-coming artists and a special focus on youth creativity, including a gallery dedicated to student work.
Community events — including a revival of the storied Beaux Arts Ball — will round out a yearlong series of shows, competitions and artist talks that bring together local and international voices, linking the center’s history to the community it serves today.
The celebration kicks off on Oct. 9 with solo and group exhibitions, including Legacy x Response: SARTQ Responds to a Century of ACS, referring to Art Center Sarasota. This group exhibition comes from a network of local artists — SARTQ — which plan to honor the center’s history by creating contemporary works that open modern dialogue with the past.
“I think there’s a lot of responsibility coming into an organization that’s 100 years old, but I believe so strongly in the mission that it’s easy to uphold each day,” Ceasar told Suncoast Searchlight. “It’s a little daunting, but I think the approach we’re taking by connecting with our community only makes it an easier task.”
That conversation between past and present is fitting for an institution that has been entwined with Sarasota’s cultural life for nearly a century. To understand what this milestone means, it helps to look back at how it all began.
From art association to community hub
In 1926, the same year John Ringling opened his Venetian-style mansion on Sarasota Bay and the Florida land boom began to collapse, Sarasota County Schools’ then-art supervisor Marcia Ashton Rader helped establish the Sarasota Art Association. The group of local artists met regularly, planning exhibitions and community events, often borrowing space wherever they could find it.
Sarasota at the time was still carving out its identity as home to a mix of homesteaders, winter visitors and circus families drawn south by the promise of sunshine. The association’s shows were modest, but they gave residents a glimpse of a larger world and offered local artists a stage to share their work.
In 1948, the group finally broke ground on a permanent home: a 600-square-foot building with a single gallery next door to the Sarasota Municipal Auditorium. That space, now known as Gallery 3, became the foundation of what would grow into today’s Art Center campus.
Over time, classrooms, outdoor galleries and additional exhibition halls were added, reflecting both the center’s ambitions and Sarasota’s emergence as a cultural destination. By the 1960s, it was no longer just a place to view art but a true community hub, where locals came to learn, create and connect.
One of the art center’s most vibrant traditions was the Beaux Arts Ball, a lavish costume gala that became the social event of Sarasota’s mid‑20th century.
First hosted by Ringling School of Art and later taken over by the Art Association around 1948, the ball became known for its spectacle. At its height, it drew more than a thousand guests in elaborate costumes, some so unwieldy they could hardly fit indoors, with parades, murals and ceiling sculptures turning the auditorium into a carnival of art and theater.
After fading out decades ago, the ball saw sporadic revivals over the years but was otherwise relegated to the past. Now, as part of its centennial celebration, the Art Center is restoring the event in full glory on March 21 at the Municipal Auditorium — an opportunity not just to honor a beloved tradition, but to bring the community together in shared creativity.
Showcasing resilience, identity and access
For Ceaser, the centennial lineup is about more than marking an anniversary — it’s a chance to showcase perspectives that reflect Sarasota’s community and beyond. To her, that means highlighting artists whose work speaks to resilience, identity and accessibility, themes that mirror both her own story and the center’s mission.
That vision is carried out in part by Christina Baril, Art Center curator and director of exhibitions, who has spent months working with Ceaser to shape the lineup. She helped recruit artists, curate themes and orchestrate the logistics of a yearlong celebration.
“My passion is really displaying a variety of styles and concepts that you’re not expecting to see at a free arts organization,” Baril said. “That’s very important to me.”
One of those artists is Juan Alonso-Rodríguez, who developed a passion for art after moving from Cuba to Seattle in 1982. Unable to afford high-end pieces, he began creating his own, framing them at the print shop where he worked until the owner encouraged him to display them.
Soon, his exhibition Earthly Glyphs will fill the Art Center’s galleries with textural paintings that imagine the Earth’s strata under a microscope. He said he worked with acrylic and molding pastes and experimented with creating work on an unstretched canvas to look like “some scroll that somebody would find rolled up somewhere.”
His work will be on display from Oct. 9 through Nov. 15.
“You can’t ask for anything better, not only to be asked to do a solo show, but to be part of a huge celebration,” said Alonso-Rodríguez, who now lives in St. Petersburg. “I’ve been working for 40-some years, and I feel like I’m kind of at the top of my game right now. I’m really excited about this body of work that I’m putting into the show.”
He’ll be joined by artists across a wide spectrum — from solo exhibitions such as Echoes: Movement and Permanence by Desly Rubio to juried shows with themes ranging from prominent icons to theatrical spectacle. In a juried show, anyone from the community can submit work, which is then selected and critiqued by a qualified juror.
That open-door approach reinforces Ceaser’s conviction that art belongs to everyone. It’s also embodied by creators like Njeri Kinuthia, a Kenyan-born multi-media visual artist whose portraits explore identity and cultural expectations.
Her solo exhibit, titled Reconstruction: Mwacha Mila Ni Si Mtumwa, touches on how culture shapes us and what it means to create your own identity outside of cultural norms. The title is a Swahili proverb meaning “he who abandons their culture becomes a slave.” Kinuthia crossed out one word in the proverb and replaced it with “si” to signify that person is “not” a slave.
Kinuthia, whose exhibit begins Oct. 9, said she got inspiration for this theme in Kenya by observing social and cultural norms surrounding women that made her question the patriarchy.
“By abandoning some misogynistic practices or norms, am I really a slave when I do that?” said Kinuthia, who uses sewing, embroidery and cross-hatching in her work. “I actually think it’s empowering if you’re brave enough to leave some of the things that your culture does that don’t serve you.”
Kinuthia didn’t always have the freedom to work in this style. Trained in fashion school in Kenya, she supported herself by painting commissioned portraits of people and pets before teaching herself fine art. That portfolio earned her a scholarship to the University of Central Florida, where she moved in 2021. Now a professor and exhibiting artist, she said she’s proud to be part of ACS’ centennial legacy.
For Baril, supporting artists like Kinuthia, Rubio and Alonso-Rodríguez is the best way to honor the ACS. She wants people to carry any kind of emotion home with them after viewing the art.
“I hope that they have a reaction, even if it’s a negative reaction,” Baril said. “Art is doing its job if you feel something from it.”
Staying true beyond the centennial
Sarasota is not short on cultural offerings. From opera to ballet to world-class museums, the city’s arts landscape is crowded. Yet Art Center Sarasota holds a distinct place within it — a community hub that has shaped local creativity for nearly a century.
Its challenge now is staying relevant long after the fanfare of its centennial fades. For Ceaser, surmounting that challenge lies in the same principle that guided the center from the start: never straying from its mission “to connect creatives with the community to explore issues around well-being and the human condition.”
“Having a strong sense of who we are and what we won’t negotiate with helps us stay true,” Ceaser said.
For her, that commitment begins with the next generation. A former teacher at Wilkinson Elementary School, Ceaser said she has seen opportunities for youth art shrink in schools. She wants ACS to be a place where young people can create without grades or judgment.
“We want to make sure that we’re a venue where kids can explore creative avenues without evaluation and have the freedom to express themselves,” she said.
The center hosts annual youth summer art camps, free classes for children and their families on Saturdays and pop-up workshops for teenagers looking to experiment with new art styles. Each year, ACS also transforms its galleries into a showcase of student work — the back gallery devoted to K-8 artists, the front three reserved for high schoolers.
During those two weeks, the whole building is transformed into “this magical place of kid art,” Baril said.
Thriving as an arts center in Sarasota is one thing, but doing so in Florida is another. The state has faced devastating effects from natural storms, including last year’s triple hurricane threat of Debby, Helene and Milton. Those storms brought widespread damage and flooding to the state’s coasts.
Florida also faces strong political headwinds, especially in the arts scene. Gov. Ron DeSantis vetoed $32 million in state arts funding last year. Luckily, ACS is an independent organization, and doesn’t rely on funding from a university or larger group, Ceaser said.
Aside from that point, Ceaser said, its success as an organization is dependent on delivering promises to the community it can keep. It may not be able to control the weather or who holds political office, but it can stay faithful to its mission without sacrificing the drive and compassion that makes it who it is today.
That conviction, forged in Ceaser’s own childhood, may be the center’s strongest safeguard for the future — ensuring that, for the next 100 years, art in Sarasota remains open to everyone.
This story was produced by Suncoast Searchlight, a nonprofit newsroom of the Community News Collaborative serving Sarasota, Manatee and DeSoto counties. Learn more at suncoastsearchlight.org.
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