Gulf Coast Community Foundation, Flora Major support Hermitage |

The Hermitage property is owned by Sarasota County and is leased to the Hermitage Artist Retreat, Inc.
The property is maintained by the Hermitage Artist Retreat, Inc. and the Sarasota County Department of Parks and Recreation.

“Hermitage Sunsets @ Benderson Park: For the Love of Language” @ Nathan Benderson Park Finish Tower

Tickets

Mar 20 @ 6:30 pm – 7:30 pm

“Hermitage Sunsets @ Benderson Park: For the Love of Language”
with Hermitage Fellow Madeline Sayet

Madeline Sayet’s Hermitage Residency generously sponsored by Terry Brackett.

Presented in partnership with Nathan Benderson Park Conservancy

Thursday, March 20 at 6:30pm

Nathan Benderson Park Finish Tower (entrance at 5851 Nathan Benderson Circle, Sarasota, FL 34235)

Register here.
Registration is required. $5 per person.

Hermitage Fellow Madeline Sayet is a member of the Mohegan Tribe in Connecticut, where she was raised on a combination of traditional Mohegan stories and Shakespeare…both of which have influenced her work as a playwright, director, and performer. Kicking off the second season of Hermitage Sunsets @ NBP, this singular theater artist discusses her work – including the recent national tour of her one-person show Where We Belong – and how the love of language informs her creative process. Hear selections of Sayet’s works as the sun dips over the lake in Nathan Benderson Park.

Hermitage Fellow Madeline Sayet (she/her) is a playwright, director, and performer known throughout the theater world for her work in contemporary Native American theater and indigenizing Western classics. She is a citizen of the Mohegan Tribe, Executive Director of the Yale Indigenous Performing Arts Program, and Clinical Assistant Professor with the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS) at ASU. For her work as a theater maker, she has been honored as a Forbes “30-Under-30,” a TED Fellow, and a recipient of the White House Champion of Change Award from President Obama. Her play Where We Belong, produced by the Washington, DC-based Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, recently completed a national tour.

Apr

Fri

Hermitage Greenfield Prize Premiere “Losing My Religion” @ The Ringling Museum of Art, Historic Asolo Theater

Tickets

Apr 4 – Apr 5 all-day

“Losing My Religion”
by Hermitage Greenfield Prize Winner Rennie Harris

Presented in partnership with The Ringling Museum of Art

Made possible with generous support from the Greenfield Foundation.

Community Foundation of Sarasota County, Lead Community Sponsor.

Friday, April 4 @ 7:30pm
Saturday, April 5 @ 7:30pm

The Ringling Museum of Art (entrance at 5401 Bay Shore Rd, Sarasota, FL 34243)

Click here for more information.
Please note this performance is not part of the Hermitage’s traditional free programming. This ticketed event ($30-$40/person) is hosted by The Ringling in the Historic Asolo Theater as a part of the ‘Art of Performance’ subscription series.

Losing My Religion is a new dance creation from Rennie Harris, resulting from his 2023 Hermitage Greenfield Prize commission. The performance is a retrospective inspired by Harris’s life journey, the human experience, and today’s current political and socioeconomic theater. Through this original piece and his remarkable body of work, Harris challenges both what has come to be expected of street dance and hip-hop culture and degenerative social normatives/beliefs with his reconstructionist philosophy and approach to artmaking. As a part of this work, Harris will incorporate a reimagining of his renowned solo Endangered Species. The piece’s inclusion tells a story of systemic racism and revolt and offers a shift away from what was, to what is, and what can be. Losing My Religion examines languages of protest, resilience, and power, while the choreography and forms invite audiences to imagine the ways in which they can use their bodies as resistance.

Lorenzo ‘Rennie’ Harris, winner of the 2023 Hermitage Greenfield Prize in Dance and Choreography, was born and raised in an African American community in North Philadelphia. In 1992, Harris founded Rennie Harris Puremovement, a street dance theater company dedicated to preserving and disseminating hip-hop culture through workshops, classes, hip-hop history lecture demonstrations, long-term residencies, mentoring programs, and public performances. Harris founded his company based on the belief that hip-hop is the most important original expression of a new generation. With its roots in the inner-city African American and Latino communities, hip-hop can be characterized as a contemporary indigenous form, one that expresses universal themes that extend beyond racial, religious, and economic boundaries, and one that can help bridge these divisions. Harris’ work encompasses the diverse and rich African American traditions of the past, while simultaneously presenting the voice of a new generation through its ever-evolving interpretations of dance. Harris is committed to providing audiences with a sincere view of the essence and spirit of hip-hop. Harris was voted one of the most influential people in the last one hundred years of Philadelphia history. Among his awards are honorary doctorates from Bates College and Columbia College. The London Times wrote of Mr. Harris that he is “the Basquiat of the U.S. contemporary dance scene.”

Apr

Sat

Hermitage Greenfield Prize Exhibition “Currents of Resistance” @ The Ringling Museum of Art

Tickets

Apr 5 @ 10:00 am – Aug 10 @ 5:00 pm

“Currents of Resistance”
by Hermitage Greenfield Prize Winner Sandy Rodriguez

Presented in partnership with The Ringling Museum of Art

Made possible with generous support from the Greenfield Foundation.

Community Foundation of Sarasota County, Lead Community Sponsor.

Friday, April 5 – Sunday, August 10th, 2025

The Ringling Museum of Art (entrance at 5401 Bay Shore Rd, Sarasota, FL 34243)

Click here for more information.
Please note this program is not part of the Hermitage’s traditional free programming. This exhibition is part of The Ringling’s admission fees ($30/person).

Sandy Rodriguez, a first-generation Chicana who grew up along the US-Mexico border, is an artist who engages with the colonial histories of the Americas, Indigenous knowledge systems, memory, and issues surrounding migration, both past and present, all grounded in the specificity of land. One of the unique aspects of her practice is her engagement with and research into the material aspects of indigenous artistic traditions for the Americas. She is using hand processed pigments derived from earth, plants, and insects, sourced from specimens collected during her fieldwork and residency at the Hermitage for her watercolors. This Hermitage Greenfield Prize commission is a further exploration of a series of exhibitions for which she has been celebrated, which maps the ongoing cycles of violence on communities of color by blending historical and recent events; this will be her first in this region.

Sandy Rodriguez (b. 1975, National City, CA) is the recipient of the 2023 Hermitage Greenfield Prize in Visual Art. She is a Los Angeles-based artist and researcher, and first-generation Chicana raised on the US-Mexico border. Her Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón is made up of a collection of maps and paintings about the intersections of history, social memory, contemporary politics, and cultural production. Rodriguez earned her BFA from California Institute of Arts. She has exhibited her works at the Denver Art Museum, The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Garden, The Amon Carter Museum of American Art and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Busan, South Korea. Her work is in the permanent collections of Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, TX, The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Garden. San Marino, CA and others. She was awarded the Caltech-Huntington Art+Research Residency, Creative Capital Award and Migrations initiative from Mellon Foundation Just Futures Initiative and Global Cornell. Rodriguez and her work have been featured in BBC News: In the Studio, Hyperallergic, LA Weekly, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Spectrum News/NY1, and on several radio programs and podcasts.

“Meet Rucyl!” @ Historic Spanish Point

Tickets

Apr 5 @ 5:30 pm – 6:30 pm

“Meet Rucyl!”
An Hour with the 2025 Hermitage Greenfield Prize winner

Saturday, April 5 at 5:30pm

Historic Spanish Point (entrance at 401 N Tamiami Trail, Osprey, FL 342295)

Register here.
Registration is required. $5 per person.

Combining jazz, avant-garde R&B, hip-hop, and more through a unique blend of electronics and vocals, Rucyl Mills‘ sound art is grounded in a belief that humanity can gracefully evolve and find new forms of creative expression. Join the Hermitage for an hour of conversation and sound with this artist blazing a trail to the future of music.

Rucyl Mills is an American sound artist with a unique approach to music composition that blends noise art, bass wave, sample collage, and avant-garde R&B. She uses MIDI controllers, drone synths, and effects processors to create experimental compositions that are kinetic architectures for stage and film. Mills was an original member of the politically charged hip-hop group The Goats, performing internationally alongside bands like Bad Brains, Fishbone, and The Beastie Boys. Her creative methodologies deeply lean on punk, early dancehall, lovers rock, black folk, new wave, hip-hop, jazz, and experimental musical genres that celebrate anti-conventional compositional structure and performance as protest. Her preferred palette of electronic instruments and experimental software represents her belief that humanity can gracefully evolve using technology in art by democratizing access, and fostering new forms of creative expression and collaboration. Inspired by the experimental jazz musician Sun Ra, Mills co-founded Saturn Never Sleeps, an improvisational futuretronic label and audiovisual group. Mills has created interactive musical experiences, including the “Chakakhantroller,” a wearable MIDI controller for solo audiovisual performance; and “Sound Prism,” a solar powered interactive installation that explores sound as a physical representation of the frequencies of the color spectrum.

Apr

Sun

2025 Hermitage Greenfield Prize Dinner @ Michael's On East

Tickets

Apr 6 @ 6:00 pm – 8:30 pm

Anchoring a series of events celebrating the prestigious Hermitage Greenfield Prize, this elegant dinner heralds the jury-selected prize recipient. The $35,000 Hermitage Greenfield Prize commission is awarded annually by the Hermitage Artist Retreat in partnership with the Greenfield Foundation, and rotates among music, theater, and visual art.

The 2025 Hermitage Greenfield Prize will be awarded in the discipline of music, and the newly commissioned work will premiere in Sarasota in the spring of 2027.

Click here for more information.

March – April 2025 Mar – Apr 2025

Hermitage Artists Respond to COVID-19.

Engage Creativity