Contributor Bonnie Silvestri took her family to see Ringling In Bloom, and shares some of the gorgeous sights in this photo gallery.

Kirsten writes: “The Academy Awards are this Sunday with fun ways to view the show. It’s entertaining to watch Hollywood, but I hope everyone is making the most out of their own lives in the starring role! Get out there this weekend and enjoy it all.”

The Ringling’s Associate Director of Programming Dwight Currie says it’s ” … very first and foremost, an expression of, just an explosion of a new renaissance in the creative use of language, and gesture, and character and emotion, situation, new music, new media and musicality, in this new work that is being created.”

The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art unveils its latest exhibition, Paolo Veronese: A Master and His Workshop in Renaissance Venice, to the public today. Stepping through the threshold of the museum’s Searing Wing feels like walking into a visual banquet hall, where only the most decadent and sumptuous of delicacies hang on display for the eyes’ consumption.

As history runs its course, the grandeur of buildings and sprawling empires, like the great men and women who build them, rises, falls and rises again with the tides of time — and since the dawn of civilization, mankind has gone to great lengths to document that process through art. With the advent of photography in the late 19th century, humanity gained the ability to turn a lens on history to capture these moments — from the construction of the Eiffel Tower in 1888 to the fall of the World Trade [...]

As my husband and I watched the fireworks exploding overhead in the museum courtyard during the Ringling International Arts Festival (RIAF) closing night, I thought about the festival’s impact on our community. Several years ago, Sarasota Ballet Director Iain Webb told me of the move to create a major arts festival for Sarasota when I interviewed him for Attitudes magazine, and I was so excited! I had recently moved to Sarasota from New York City, willing to uproot because of the wide variety of local artistic offerings. But at the time [...]