Preserving centuries-old artifacts.
Managing acres of manicured grounds and rose gardens.
Shielding valuable art from the ravages of powerful storms.
For a quarter century, Florida State University has staffed, operated and managed the finances of the arts complex known as The Ringling – including the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, the circus museum, Asolo Theater and the historic Ca’ d’Zan mansion along 66 acres of Sarasota’s bayfront.
But at Gov. Ron DeSantis’s request, those duties could be turned over to New College of Florida, a tiny public liberal arts college that relies on millions of dollars in state support to stay afloat and has faced accusations of financial mismanagement in the two years since DeSantis installed political allies in key leadership roles at the school.
FSU currently pours vast resources into the maintenance of The Ringling, from managing the museum’s endowment of more than $50 million to employing more than 200 staff to run the museum, a Suncoast Searchlight examination of public records shows.
Managing an art museum requires expertise – hiring and retaining curators, securing millions in donations, and protecting the artwork. The Ringling is especially unique in that, in addition to the art museum, its staff maintains a museum dedicated to circus history and is tasked with preserving John Ringling’s historic mansion.
That’s why DeSantis’s proposal to hand over The Ringling to New College has many museum supporters questioning how the liberal arts school could feasibly take over administrative responsibilities of an operation so complex.
FSU and The Ringling “are inextricably linked,” said Nancy Parrish, who served as chair of the John & Mable Ringling Museum of Art Foundation from 2018 to 2020. Parrish and 15 other donors, former foundation chairs and former board members argued in a public letter that to pull them apart would result in a “waste of taxpayer resources” and “significantly harm The Ringling and FSU.”
“FSU provides a lot of support to facilities, maintenance and architecture,” said Leon Ellin, who sits on The Ringling’s board of directors. “They have a big staff, and they're able to function as an intelligent landlord to The Ringling.”
Spokespeople for The Ringling and FSU declined to comment, and New College representatives did not return a request for comment.
A massive undertaking: What it takes to run The Ringling
In the museum’s telling, the art museum and Ca’ d’Zan, which Ringling bequeathed to the state in his will, fell into a state of disrepair after Ringling died in 1936. When the property was transferred to the state in 1946, private donors and a skeleton staff worked to keep the property operational – making the buildings functional enough for the public to access them and addressing the longstanding problem of weatherproofing.
In 1948, the museum’s first director, Arthur Everett Austin, Jr., opened the circus museum. In 1952, he oversaw the establishment of the Historic Asolo Theater, which houses the restored interior of the original Asolo Theatre built in the late 18th century inside a castle in Asolo, Italy.
When FSU took over The Ringling in 2000, the museum garnered sufficient resources to support multimillion-dollar renovations to the Asolo Theater and Ca’ d’Zan. Under the stewardship of FSU, The Ringling oversaw the expansion of the circus museum and, in 2016, created a center for Asian art and a gallery of contemporary art.
FSU has “spent a good 25 years investing in improving the museum and bringing it up to the standards of a top-tier museum,” said Brett Ashley Crawford, professor of arts management at Carnegie Mellon University.
Documents held by the FSU Foundation and other direct-support organizations are exempt from Florida’s public records laws, and FSU denied a request from Suncoast Searchlight for the museum’s operating budget on those grounds.
But publicly available records, including FSU payroll records and annual financial reports by both FSU and The Ringling, show that today, the institutions are intertwined.
As of March 13, there were 229 FSU employees at The Ringling, according to FSU payroll records. Workers staff the museum’s library, clean buildings, provide security for the estate’s properties, maintain the museum’s grounds, curate its collections, and create educational programs.
During hurricanes, which pose a unique threat to The Ringling given its location on Sarasota Bay, Ringling staff prepares for high winds and flooding and mitigates their impacts on the museum’s collections.
Before Hurricane Irma in September 2017, workers sequestered and crated works of art to protect them from the storm. During Hurricane Helene, in September, the basement of Ca’ d’Zan flooded and the next month, in the aftermath of Hurricane Milton, The Ringling dealt with roof damage to the circus museum.
Labor costs alone to run The Ringling exceed $9 million annually, FSU payroll records show. That work is supported by the museum’s more than $50 million endowment, which is invested by the FSU Foundation. According to The Ringling's 2023-24 annual report, two of the museum’s top three donors – giving $1 million or more each – were FSU and the FSU Foundation.
In comparison, New College has struggled to manage its own operations, relying on tens of millions of dollars in funds from the state legislature – including $10 million for temporary student housing due to a lack of functional dormitories. According to New College’s website, the school’s art department is staffed by just one professor. The college’s entire endowment – of roughly $50 million, according to its most recent tax filings – is comparable to that of The Ringling.
Accreditation at risk? What happens if New College takes over
While the public response to the proposed transfer of The Ringling away from FSU has focused largely on logistical and financial questions, the politics of the proposal loom large.
After DeSantis reshaped the board of trustees of New College and packed political allies on the board, the school’s new leadership quickly sought to root out programming that conflicted with their right-wing ideology – dismantling the college’s Gender Studies program and dumping a mountain of books on subjects like Black and LGBTQ+ history in the trash.
The push for New College to take over The Ringling carries echoes of national politics, too, as President Donald Trump performs a sweeping takeover of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the national cultural center in Washington, D.C. The move has introduced questions about the direction of the Kennedy Center, and whether Trump will use it for state propaganda.
“You can use the arts as a propagandist’s tool, and [they have] been used as a propagandist’s tool at various moments in history,” said Crawford, pointing to the arts in Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union as an example. “What is unique in the modern world is the business structures that we have, in theory, are designed to make it difficult to do that.”
The rules governing nonprofits limit people with financial or other personal conflicts of interest in a nonprofit from sitting on its board.
New College’s strong ideological position also raises questions about its ability to effectively govern a museum whose accreditation is contingent on its ability to maintain a degree of independence. To secure accreditation by the American Alliance of Museums, the largest museum association in the U.S., museums are required to conduct research in accordance with scholarly standards while maintaining a clear separation of roles between the various stakeholders of the institution.
A museum whose board dictates what its curators can and can't do could risk losing accreditation.
“They have to have independence,” Crawford said.
This story was produced by Suncoast Searchlight, a nonprofit newsroom of the Community News Collaborative serving Sarasota, Manatee, and DeSoto counties. Learn more at suncoastsearchlight.org.
