On Monday, Fort Myers Mural Society Executive Director Shari Shifrin learned that the City of Sarasota is planning to remove 200 hand-painted sidewalk panels that line Pineapple and Orange avenues in Sarasota’s historic Burns Court arts and culture district.
“It would be a shame to lose that project,” Shifrin responded. “It is quite phenomenal.”
Shifrin has more than a passing interest in those murals. Fort Myers Mural Society artists participated in the project, which was sponsored by Avenida de Colores, the nonprofit that stages the annual Sarasota Chalk Festival. They joined members of the Sarasota Mural Society and students from Ringling College of Art and Design and Booker High.
“It involved over a hundred artists and a lot of donated paint,” said Shifrin. “Every one of those sidewalk squares are a historic vantage point to Sarasota and its community throughout the last 150-year history, right down to several pieces depicting the original Ringling Circus. The Ringling Museum pieces are in there. Sarasota Film Festival is depicted in there, and then a lot of the other tourism roadside attractions were also. There’s a lot of historic documentation that was sort of compiled just to support this project.”
Both the federal and Florida Departments of Transportation now prohibit asphalt art of any kind in streets, intersections, crosswalks and roadside sidewalks. They say that the art distracts motorists and pedestrians and causes confusion that jeopardizes public safety…