The Ringling opens Kotler-Coville Glass Pavilion

If you’ve visited the Ringling in recent months, you’ve seen the striking new building being constructed, just to the east of the Historic Asolo Theater.

Starting Monday, you can go inside. Ringling officials promise that what you’ll find inside is just as impressive.

That new 5,000-square-foot building is the Kotler-Coville Glass Pavilion. After an invitation-only ceremony on Sunday, it will open to the public on Monday.

The pavilion’s gallery will be home to the Ringling’s extensive collection of studio glass art, plus other glass art that belongs to the museum, including antique pieces collected by John Ringling himself. It will also showcase loaned and touring collections.

“It’s a gallery devoted to our glass collection,” said Steven High, the executive director of the Ringling. “It includes antique glass, industrial glass and our large collection of contemporary glass that we’ve been concentrating on for the past five years.”

The building itself is architecturally bold, with a glass wall on the east side that provides lovely views of the Ringling campus. The design impressed the people at Architectural Digest, who featured it in a recent story about the country’s best new museums and museum additions.

The glass wall presents some challenges, though.

“Natural light is very strong,” High said. “Even glass can change color under natural light. The chemicals inside the glass change color. So we had to find a way to manage the light.”

Architects, inspired by the pattern’s waves made in the sand on a Florida beach, created a series of angled fins for the on the outside of that glass wall that blocks the most intense natural light. But if you look out the window from certain angles within the pavilion, the fins virtually disappear and the view is unobstructed.

The two-story pavilion will connect to the east side of the visitors pavilion. The entrance to the Kotler-Coville Glass Pavilion will be adjacent to the entrance to the visitors building.

The initial exhibition will focus almost exclusively on studio glass art.

Besides exhibiting studio glass — an art form that developed in the 1960s in Toledo, Ohio, which has spawned such well-known artists as Dale Chihuly — the 2,500-sqaure-foot gallery area of the Kotler-Coville Glass Pavilion will offer much-needed amenities for the Historic Asolo Theater.

The pavilion will serve as the entrance to the theater. Instead of entering through the visitors area, theater-goers can walk through the glass pavilion and enter into the theater directly, through any of our entrances, High said.

That theater now has no rehearsal area, which was sometimes a problem during the Ringling International Arts Festival and other events that brought several performance groups into the theater at the same time. People with tickets for seats in the balcony of the theater will be able to enter through the second floor of the pavilion.

That arrangement should help alleviate some of the crowded conditions in the visitors area that often occur before shows in the Historic Asolo Theater, when theater-goers and museum-goers are packed into a limited space and going in every different direction.

The Historic Asolo theater has had no dedicated rehearsal space until now, which meant that performing groups often had to rehearse on the stage.

“It’s been limiting,” said Dwight Currie, the Ringling’s curator of performance.

The new building has a rehearsal area exactly the same size as the stage in the Historic Asolo. That will mean that one show can be in rehearsal while another show is being performed for an audience. The rehearsal space could be used for out-of-town companies to develop and premiere new works in Sarasota.

“It can be less expensive for these groups to come to Sarasota for two weeks than to rent rehearsal space in New York,” Currie said. “This will allow them to be more engaged with the community.”

Because one of the pavilion’s functions will be to serve as an entrance to the Historic Asolo Theater, it will be free at all times.

Instead of entering to the grounds of the Ringling through the relatively bland and business-like visitors area, High said, they can now enter through the Kotler-Coville Glass Pavilion and find themselves immediately immersed in art.

“Until now, when you came to the museum, you’d go into the visitors’ pavilion and buy your ticket, or check in if you were a member, and then leave that area and go one of the museums,” High said. “It could be 20 or 30 minutes after you arrived before you saw your first work of art. Now you’ll be able to come to Ringling and the first thing you’ll see is a work of art. We think that’s an important symbolic statement.”

This story was originally published January 21, 2018 at 7:07 AM with the headline "The Ringling opens Kotler-Coville Glass Pavilion."