This March, The Ringling Museum of Art will present Embodied: Highlights from The Ringling’s Collec on of Modern and Contemporary Art in Searing Galleries East. The exhibition will be on view from March 9, 2024, through September 21, 2025.

The figure is one of the oldest records of our existence as a species capable of storytelling; depictions of the human body constitute some of the oldest subjects in art. Embodied expands on the definition of the human figure by bringing together diverse representations in painting, sculpture, fiber, video, and mixed media by some of the most exci ng ar sts working in the tweneth and twenty-first centuries.

“This dynamic array allows for an explora on of a range of stylistic approaches to the depictions and interpretations of the human condition and the significance of identity”, says Ola Wlusek, the Keith D. Monda Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art who has curated the works on view. “The exhibition also demonstrates the breadth of forms and materials employed by artists whose work has been recently added to the collection, now in conversation with earlier acquisitions”.

Highlights include mixed media work Still life with quilt and drinking gourds (2021) by William Villalongo, who merges tropes from the European still life painting tradition with elements from Black histories, pop culture, and mass media to bring awareness to “the body as an abstraction, one of resiliency and flux that rewrites itself as it moves through the world”. Also on view are Tony Tiger’s Time and place: egmont key – Indian territory – LA – Oklahoma (2019), the first abstract painting by a contemporary Native American artist acquired by The Ringling; and Cauleen Smith’s film Egungun: ancestor can’t find me (2017), which draws from the movement of Afrofuturism and borrows elements from an exquisitely layered Egungun (a costumed dancer who appears at celebrations for the dead in Yoruba societies) to acknowledge Florida’s fraught past.

“We are excited to have several newly acquired works on display together with other pieces in the museum’s contemporary collection”, Executive Director Steven High says. “It’s a wonderful opportunity to experience the collection through this fresh lens".

Additional important works address the formal elements of figura ve art while exploring the ar sts’ inner psyche through portraiture and representation, including those by Benny Andrews, Marisol, Jessica Osceola, and Jake Troyli. Other works embody the artist’s personal experiences and broader observations on socio-political issues through abstraction and non objective art—a type of abstract art that does not represent specific objects, people or other subjects found in the natural world—including those by Natasha Mazurka, Linda Stein, William Pachner, and Yuriko Yamaguchi.

Support for the exhibition is paid for in part by Sarasota County Tourist Development Tax Revenues.