- March 18, 2026
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James Brown once crooned, “It’s a Man’s World,” but few would argue that women have had an outsized influence on Sarasota’s development and culture.
Most people are familiar with Bertha Palmer, the wealthy Chicago widow who gave Palmer Ranch its name, as well as Mable Ringling, whose taste helped guide her husband, John Ringling, and Marie Selby, founder of the botanical gardens that bears her name.
Less known is Marcia Rader, an art supervisor in the Sarasota School System. In 1926, she banded together with a few other members of the Sarasota Woman’s Club to form the Sarasota Art Association. In so doing, she helped create what is today known as Art Center Sarasota. Housed in a Mid-Century Modern building in The Bay on Tamiami Trail, it holds the distinction of being Sarasota’s oldest arts organization.
ACS stages juried art exhibitions and offers art education, children’s summer camps and social activities designed to create community among artists and their patrons.
Under Executive Director Katherine Ceaser, ACS is reviving its famed Beaux Arts Ball on March 21 to celebrate its 100th anniversary.
Ceaser has been preparing for the centennial celebration since she was promoted from education director in December 2024. She’s recently been assisted by Alecia Harper, the center’s new donor relations coordinator who is also doing historical research.
The celebration of a centennial inevitably provokes the question: Why has ACS survived for a century when other galleries have come and gone?
“When it first started, it was the place where everybody met. It’s where the potlucks happened, the meetings,” says Ringling College of Art and Design Chief Curator Tim Jaeger, who worked at ACS early in his career. “It’s the place that gave birth to the core. It still functions as the core for artists and art audiences while operating rotating gallery exhibitions.”
All these years later, the quarterly opening receptions for Art Center Sarasota’s juried exhibitions are still must-attend events to look at art, have a glass of wine and meet friends old and new. There is no admission fee at the gallery, which is open daily Monday through Saturday, and the artworks on display are for sale.
Women may have played a key role in the formation of the Sarasota Art Association, but men became more involved in its leadership by 1941. That year, the group incorporated as a not-for-profit under the leadership of artist Truman Fassett. Little did the men know their lives were about to be upended on Dec. 7.
Like so many cultural institutions, the Sarasota Art Association was reinvigorated by veterans returning home after World War II. They were ready to resume their education and buy homes with the help of the GI Bill. Some had trained at the Sarasota Army Air Base during the war and returned to Florida.
This post-war period set the stage for the birth of the Sarasota Art Colony. Jaeger reckons that a town of 15,000 was home to nearly 1,000 artists. Their hub and meeting place was the Sarasota Arts Association, whose members raised $12,000 to build its headquarters at 707 N. Tamiami Trail.
Among the artists involved with the art association were Syd Solomon, Jerry Farnsworth, Helen Sawyer, Harold Slingerland and illustrators Al Buell, Ben Stahl, Thornton Utz and Al Parker.
Some members of the Sarasota Art Colony had their own schools, including Dorothy and Hilton Leech. Along with the Sarasota Visual Art Center, the school was folded into the group that became Art Center Sarasota in 1999.
The Sarasota Art Association’s Mid-Century Modern gallery was designed by Frank Martin, who also designed the Chidsey Library next door. He donated the plans and supervised the construction of the building, which opened to the public Jan. 30, 1949. He also help to expand the gallery space, which was already overflowing by the time the building opened.
On the other side of the Sarasota Art Association gallery stood the Municipal Auditorium. Until the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall opened nearby in 1970, the Municipal Auditorium was a key venue for Sarasota arts events. These ran the gamut from out-of-town orchestras brought in by the Sarasota Concert Association, or the fabulous Beaux Arts Ball.
The annual art sale at the Sarasota Art Association was the last stop on the parade for the Sara de Sota pageant, a weeklong festival sponsored by the Jaycees. Based on a fictional tale written by George Chapline in 1906, it celebrated the love between Sara, the daughter of explorer Hernando de Soto, and a Seminole tribe member named Chichi-Okobee.
The art sales at the Sarasota Art Association filled an important need at a time when there were few commercial galleries in towns, notes Jaeger. They helped raise money for the nonprofit group because it received a percentage of the sale.
As one would expect, the executive director of ACS at any given time influenced the organization’s character. To be clear, none of the executive directors in this century has ignored the kids’ summer camps and art classes for seniors and children that are the lifeblood of ACS. It’s just that some directors have devoted more time and energy to areas that played to their strengths.
Under Fayeann Hayes (2007-12), there was an emphasis on community outreach and making art more accessible to underserved populations. Her successor, Lisa Berger (2012-2020), now executive director of Perlman Music Program Suncoast, made her love of fashion evident through collaborations with Saks Fifth Avenue department store and the iConcept and iConcept Jr. fashion show fundraisers. “Early in my career, I wanted to be a fashion designer,” Berger confessed in an interview.
Some of the outfits for the iConcept fashion shows were created by Eric Cross, who spent a decade as visual manager of the Sarasota Saks store at its Southgate location, before it moved east to the Mall at University Town Center. Today, Cross is the general manager of Home Resources in the Rosemary District.
With her background as a gallerist in New York City, Kinsey Robb (2021-24) gave the ACS gallery space a makeover and streamlined the process for submitting art. When Robb had the galleries renovated at the beginning of her tenure, she found messages from former directors and artists on the walls when the carpeting on them was removed.
During an earlier interview, she quipped, “You’ve heard the expression, ‘If these walls could talk,’” Robb said. “Well, our walls do talk.”
Current ACS Executive Director Ceaser has leaned into the eduction aspect of the nonprofit’s mission and has revved up development.
Before joining ACS in 2023, Ceaser served as an adjunct faculty member and education adviser at the University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee. The Sarasota native also worked as a teacher in Sarasota County Schools after she, her husband and her three children moved here in 2015 to be closer to family.
The ties between ACS and schools help raise awareness of the gallery among the general public. Many parents are first introduced to ACS when their children’s art is displayed there by Sarasota County Public Schools.
Although ACS is still alive after a century, its artists and administrators often move on after a few years or so. It’s a launching pad of sorts.
“It’s valuable because it provides needed resources for artists and their advocates who want to participate. It’s exhibition, education and the opportunity to meet other artists. You also get to meet potential collectors and supporters,” says Barbara Gerdeman, who opened Creative Liberties studios and galleries in 2021 with Elizabeth Goodwill, whom she met when they both worked at ACS.
Creative Liberties has two spaces, at 901B Apricot Ave. and 927 N. Lime Ave., and curates the gallery in the Arcos Apartments. In addition to representing artists and giving them a space to create and sell their work, it offers free family artmaking events.
Sculptor Jack Dowd, one of Sarasota’s most well-known living artists, got his feet wet at ACS when he and his wife moved here in 1982. Since then, his large sculptures of eclectic characters have been the subject of shows at both The John and Mable Ringling Art Museum and Ringling College.
Outside the ACS campus on Tamiami Trail, Dowd’s piece, “Fighting Crime in Florida,” shows what he terms an “old geezer who I call Uncle” sitting on a bench with a pet alligator next to him.
Dowd reckons he has refurbished the sculpture twice because it has taken a beating from the weather.
Dowd says he used to enter his art into juried competitions at ACS, but he now shows his work exclusively at the gallery Art Avenue. “Art Center Sarasota is great for artists who are just starting out, but when you become more established, commercial galleries want exclusive arrangements,” he says.
Recent ACS administrators have had to deal with the gallery’s lack of visibility. As the performing arts have exploded in Sarasota, the visual arts have largely been eclipsed. Indeed, many visitors discover ACS by accident, before or after a concert or dance event in The Bay park.
“People wander in here and they’re surprised to learn we don’t charge for admission. We have groups that come and sketch (on the tables in the middle of the back gallery),” Ceaser said in an interview when she was first hired. “There aren’t a lot of barriers to access here. That’s why I like it.”
