Festival celebrates new Asian art center at Ringling in Sarasota

Just a couple of weeks ago, the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art hosted a ceremony for the ground-breaking for its Kotler-Coville Glass Pavilion. Construction should be completed next year. Another large new contemporary space is slated to open at the museum in the fall.

This weekend, the museum will celebrate the grand opening of another new addition, The Center for Asian Art. It's been under construction for the past couple of years. "We never take our hard hats off around here," said Maureen Zaremba, the curator of education for

the museum.

Planning and preparation for Center for Asian Art has been going on for a decade, Zaremba said, and the museum has opened a few of the center's galleries one at a time since February.

The entire center will open to the public today. The museum will celebrate with a community festival that takes place in a tent and on the grounds adjacent to the new center, which is on the west side of museum's main building.

The festival features entertainment with a pan-Asian flair, including a dance company from Tampa that performs all kinds of Indian dance, from traditional forms to dances from Bollywood movies; a company that performs Japanese taiko drumming, and storytellers performing classic tales from all parts of Asia. The Sarasota-Manatee Kimono Society will be on hand to show off the traditional Japanese gowns and demonstrate the proper way to wear a kimono.

There's also a scavenger hunt, in which participants will be given photographs of scenes around the Ringling that they'll search for, plus demonstrations of karate and yoga.

The festival's free with regular museum admission. It gets going at 10 a.m., when the museum opens, and continues until 2 p.m. The museum will be open until 5 p.m., and Zaremba said Ringling officials hope festival-goers will explore other parts of the museum and the Ringling grounds.

"It's a great way for the community to experience this new wing," Zaremba said. The new wing includes several galleries, which will showcase items from the museum's wide-ranging collection of Asian art.

"John and Mable Ringling collected Asian art in a small way," Zaremba said. "But we know that they were interested in building a comprehensive collection."

The Sarasota art community has been especially generous in building the museum's Asian collection from the seeds left by John and Mable Ringling, Zaremba said.

"It's a growing collection," she said. "The museum now has strong holdings in Chinese ceramics. We've received wonderful gifts of Japanese prints and Turkestan jewelry. This community is very rich in people who have a connection to Asia. Either they've lived there or they travel there often."

The new Center for Asian Art measures about 25,000 square feet. It's an extension of the museum's west wing. Besides the galleries that are dedicated to rotating installations of the museum's Asian art holdings, it includes a 125-seat lecture hall, an object and print study room and open storage spaces to increase public access to the collections.

Details: 10 a.m.-2 p.m. May 15, John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, 5401 Bay Shore Road, Sarasota. Admission: $25 adults, $20 seniors 65 and older; children 6-17 $5, children under 17 free with a paid adult admission. Information: 941-358-3180, ringling.org.

Marty Clear, features writer/columnist, can be reached at 941-708-7919. Follow twitter.com/martinclear.

This story was originally published May 13, 2016 at 6:02 PM with the headline "Festival celebrates new Asian art center at Ringling in Sarasota ."