- May 2, 2024
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After a 2011 trip to Greenville, S.C., City Commissioner Suzanne Atwell was determined to find a defining interactive public art project for downtown Sarasota. It just took a few years to get there.
The city worked with the Arts and Cultural Alliance of Sarasota County in an attempt to recreate Greenville’s “Mice on Main” project, but that process quickly went awry. An attempt to place painted sculptures of mice on downtown streets ended with the city getting sued for Sunshine Law violations.
Beyond the legal entanglements, though, Arts Alliance Executive Director Jim Shirley said the project simply didn’t feel like the best option for a public art project in downtown Sarasota.
“Nothing ever really popped — it didn’t seem to be the right thing,” Shirley said. “We knew it would revolve around the arts, but we didn’t know the answer at the time.”
Now, both Shirley and Atwell believe an answer has been found. The Sarasota Keys project, which consists of public pianos painted by local artists on downtown sidewalks, returned for its third season Wednesday. Based on the reception the project has drawn from the community, Atwell thinks her quest has paid off despite the wait.
“I’m finding the more interactive, the more fun it is,” Atwell said. “Anytime I’m in a restaurant or something and I see the pianos, there are people laughing and smiling.”
The project, organized by the Arts Alliance, will feature four pianos for the public to play, with potentially a fifth to come. That number is down from previous years — the group has gotten its pianos secondhand, and after two years of exposure to the outdoors, Mother Nature has taken its toll on some.
Shirley says that’s not a sign the project is unsuccessful or on its way out. He highlights that officials from Mississippi, New York and Ohio have all come to town to find out how they could replicate the Sarasota Keys program. The project also serves as a medium to connect the public with art in a variety of ways, a feature on which the Arts Alliance hopes to capitalize.
“We’re doing a promotion to the piano teachers to encourage them to bring their students into downtown and let them play around the pianos,” Shirley said. “In the past, we’ve done a lot of pop-up concerts. We try to do a lot of that to stimulate the artistic feel for downtown, to have a vibrant community type of feel.”
In addition to adding another vibrant element to the downtown environment, both Shirley and Atwell praised the project for its ability to promote art within the community.
“I think interactive art projects incubate talent,” Atwell said. “You never know who’s going to come up and play a piano.”
Perhaps the defining moment for the Sarasota Keys project came last summer. A visitor to downtown Sarasota recorded a video of Donald Gould, a homeless man, playing Styx’s “Come Sail Away” on the piano in front of Clasico Café and Bar. The video has racked up over 17 million views on YouTube, and became a life-changing opportunity for Gould, who ended up playing the national anthem before an NFL game in September.
Shirley points out that this project also brings attention to established artists in Sarasota. Viktorija Bulava, the artist who painted the piano Gould played in front of Clasico, got serious exposure when the video went viral.
“That artist has gotten worldwide attention to her work,” Shirley said. “We’ve had a lot of nice repercussions like that.”
Three years after the city endorsed a trial run for the piano project, those involved with Sarasota Keys hope it’s on the road to becoming a local institution.
“It hasn’t been huge — it’s not our opera — but it’s been a nice signature to add to the artistic community Sarasota is,” Shirley said. “It’s something the Arts Alliance can do to help reach more people at all levels in the community with the arts."
