Sarasota is a city in and the county seat of Sarasota County, Florida, United States. It is located in Southwest Florida, the southern end of the Greater Tampa Bay Area, and north of Fort Myers and Punta Gorda. Its official limits include Sarasota Bay and several barrier islands between the bay and the Gulf of Mexico. Sarasota is a principal city of the North Port-Bradenton-Sarasota, FL Metropolitan Statistical Area. According to the 2020 U.S. census, Sarasota had a population of 54,842, up from 51,917 at the 2010 census.
Daniel Dale Johnston was an American singer, musician and artist regarded as a significant figure in outsider, lo-fi, and alternative music scenes. Most of his work consisted of cassettes recorded alone in his home, and his music was frequently cited for its "pure" and "childlike" qualities.
Creative Loafing is an Atlanta-based publisher of a monthly arts and culture newspaper/magazine. The company publishes a 60,000 circulation monthly publication which is distributed to in-town locations and neighborhoods on the first Thursday of each month. The company has historically been a part of the alternative weekly newspapers association in the United States.
Street painting, also known as screeving, pavement art, street art, and sidewalk art, is the performance art of rendering artistic designs on pavement such as streets, sidewalks, and town squares with impermanent and semi-permanent materials such as chalk.
Street art is visual art created in public locations for public visibility. It has been associated with the terms "independent art", "post-graffiti", "neo-graffiti" and guerrilla art.
The Sarasota Herald-Tribune is a daily newspaper, located in Sarasota, Florida, founded in 1925 as the Sarasota Herald.
South by Southwest (SXSW) is an annual conglomeration of parallel film, interactive media, and music festivals and conferences organized jointly that take place in mid-March in Austin, Texas. It began in 1987 and has continued growing in both scope and size every year. In 2017, the conference lasted for 10 days with the interactive track lasting for five days, music for seven days, and film for nine days. There was no in-person event in 2020 and 2021 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic in Austin; in both years there was a smaller online event instead.
Elizabeth McGrath is an American artist and singer. She is based in California who works primarily in the fields of sculpture and animation. Her work is often evocative of the darker side of life, and she has been nicknamed Bloodbath McGrath after the subject matter of her works. Along with her career in art, from 1989 to 1999 she was the lead singer for the hardcore band Tongue, and co-founded the fanzine Censor This. From 2000–2011 she was the lead singer of the Los Angeles-born band Miss Derringer, along with her husband/songwriter Morgan Slade.
Vernon Gale Buchanan is an American businessman and politician serving as the U.S. representative for Florida's 16th congressional district since 2013. A member of the Republican Party, he first entered Congress in 2007, representing Florida's 13th congressional district until redistricting. His district is anchored by Bradenton.
Benjamin Jeffrey Steinbauer is an American director, showrunner, writer, and producer who directed the feature documentary Winnebago Man (2009). Steinbauer also directed the documentary Chop & Steele (2022), which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, and was the showrunner and director of the episodic television show High Hopes for Jimmy Kimmel's Kimmelot. He directed the PBS show Stories of the Mind, and the CBS docuseries, Pink Collar Crimes.
Melanie Stimmell Van Latum, born 1975 in Los Angeles, is an international 3D street painter and fine artist specializing in large scale chalk art and Renaissance-style inspired imagery.
Kafi Benz is an American author and artist who began participation in social entrepreneurship through environmental preservation and regional planning in 1959 as a member of the Jersey Jetport Site Association, which opposed plans by the New York Port Authority to found a new airport in the Great Swamp, the central feature of a massive 55 square mile watershed in New Jersey bounded to the south and east by the Watchung Mountains, 25 miles west of Manhattan.
Avenida de Colores, Inc. was founded in 2010 by Denise Kowal as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation, based in Sarasota, Florida in the United States. The corporation produced the Sarasota Chalk Festival, a cultural event designed to celebrate the sixteenth century performance art of Italian street painting.
Sarasota Chalk Festival is an American cultural event of public art that celebrates a performing art form of pavement art also known as Italian street painting. It was founded in Sarasota, Florida by Denise Kowal. During the festival artists use chalk, and occasionally special paint, to paint the road surface to create large works of art while the viewer can watch the creative process. The festival is focused around the street artists who are known as Madonnari in Italy or commonly referred to Street Painters, Chalk Artists, Sidewalk Artists, or Pavement Artists. The festival is held annually in downtown Sarasota in Burns Square.
The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art is the official state art museum of Florida, located in Sarasota, Florida. It was established in 1927 as the legacy of Mable Burton Ringling and John Ringling for the people of Florida. Florida State University assumed governance of the museum in 2000.
Kris Moyes is an Australian-born director and producer. He is perhaps best known for his innovative music videos and Television advertisements.
Ego Leonard is a Dutch painter and sculptor, and possibly an anonymous guerrilla artist, whose works prominently feature outsized Lego figures. Sometimes the name also is applied to sculptures, apparently made by Leonard, which have been found on beaches at various locations in the world since the late 2000s. The sculptures are in the form of "minifigures", but are constructed from fibreglass enlarged to two and a half metres in height, and have the message “No Real Than You Are” in capital letters written on their torsos. The appearance of an "Ego Leonard" giant figure on Siesta Beach, Florida, became number two on the Time list of the "Top 10 Oddball-News Stories of 2011." It is unclear whether Ego Leonard is the name of a person or merely a fictional character as the figure, but it is most likely a fictional name, as Ego Leonard can be reworked to read L, Ego or LEGO. The letters can also be rearranged to spell "A LEGO drone".
Leon Keer is a Dutch pop-surrealist artist. He has created work on canvas and (3D) artwork on the streets across the world. Leon Keer is a leading artist in anamorphic street art. His art has been showcased in Europe, the United States, Russia, Mexico, the United Arab Emirates, Australia, New Zealand, and several Asian countries. In addition to using optical illusion, he often presents his art by adding new technologies, such as augmented reality and video mapping. The art is temporary, but the images are shared all over the world via social media.
Victor Alfred Lundy is an American architect. An exemplar of modernist architecture, he was one of the leaders of the Sarasota School of Architecture. His Warm Mineral Springs Motel, outside Warm Mineral Springs, Florida, is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. He was honored by the Smithsonian on his 90th birthday in 2013. A film on his life and work, entitled "Victor Lundy: Sculptor of Space" was premiered by the GSA on February 25, 2014.
Michael Moffett is an American shock artist. and realistic sculptor raised in New York City and Sarasota, Florida. He has spent much of his career in Cocoa Beach, Florida. He is known for his two-part, life-sized, hyper-realistic sculpture of a homeless veteran in a wheelchair looking at a second sculpture of a man's torso mounted on a tiny military tank with a gun to his head titled the Portable War Memorial. The piece deals with PTSD and veteran suicide. Many of his bronze sculptures merge human figures and industrial machines. His body casts of numerous human models are made with various materials, including resin and silicone.
