Culture of Sarasota

In the early 1950s, the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art purchased a historic Italian theater, the Asolo (now called the Historic Asolo Theater). A. Everett "Chick" Austin, the museum's first director, arranged the purchase and reassembly of the theater for performances of plays and opera. The theater had been built in 1798 and was disassembled and put into storage during the 1930s. Adolph Loewi, a Venetian collector and dealer, had purchased the theater and stored its parts until the purchase and shipment to Sarasota for the museum. The theater was rebuilt in a building that extended to the west of the northern wing of the museum, where John Ringling had intended his unrealized art school would be built. The new building, containing the historic theater, was separated from the museum by a small garden that featured statues of dwarfs. In the 1980s, the theater was used by a foreign film club that showed its films on Monday nights. When the club expanded, it built its own theater at Burns Court near Burns Square in downtown Sarasota.

Later a local architect, Stuart Barger, designed and oversaw the construction of another Asolo Theater, housed in the Florida State University Center for the Performing Arts. It is a multi-theater complex, located farther east on the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art property, being placed between Bay Shore Road and Tamiami Trail, and facing south toward Ringling Plaza. It was built around a rococo, historic Scottish theater, which had been shipped to Florida. The new complex also provides venues and facilities for students of Florida State University's MFA Acting program, the FSU/Asolo Conservatory for Actor Training. This was the administrative home of the Sarasota French Film Festival for several years. Venues around the city were used