Embracing Our Differences navigates challenges ahead of 21st annual Sarasota art exhibit

Jay Handelman, Sarasota Herald-Tribune

January 15, 2024 at 4:04 AM·5 min read

As it prepares for the Jan. 21. opening of its 21st outdoor display of giant billboards of art work and messages celebrating diversity and meant to bring together a divided world, Embracing Our Differences is experiencing more growth and expansion after a tumultuous 20th anniversary season.

Last year, just two weeks after the exhibit opened, a vandal destroyed one of the billboards displayed at Sarasota’s Bayfront Park by slashing the art and removing it from the frame that was also attached to two other pieces. No suspect was charged. The art work, inspired by a Toni Morrison book, was reprinted and replaced.

About two weeks later, officials at State College of Florida canceled a planned one-month display of the same exhibition after Embracing our Differences declined to remove art that included the words “diversity,” “inclusion,” “justice” and “equality” because they might make the exhibit run afoul of new state regulations.

“‘Hand’le with Care’ by Samantha Dennis of Woodbridge, Canada, was named Best-in-Show Adult art in the 2024 Embracing Our Differences program.

But that cancellation led to an invitation to bring this year’s exhibit to St. Petersburg for the first time. After a three-month display in Sarasota, the exhibition will be set up at Poynter Park for one-month.

“St. Petersburg reached out to us and we will be up for a month with the full support of the city and we’re thrilled about that,” said Executive Director Sarah Wertheimer. “It is positivity coming from the negativity last year.”

Each year, Embracing Our Differences selects 50 pieces of art submitted by children and adults from around the world and matches them with messages that are meant to inspire a better understanding of the world. This year, the organizations received more than 16,000 submissions, about equally divided between art and quotes, from 125 countries. Panels of judges make the final choices for each category.

A grand opening celebration is scheduled for noon to 3 p.m. Jan. 21 at Bayfront Park with tours, music and food trucks.

Vandalized artwork at the annual "Embracing Our Differences" art exhibit at Bayfront Park.

Navigating new state laws

Up to 15,000 school students from the Sarasota region take field trips to visit the display and others participate with virtual programs. But students won’t be shown six of the 50 pieces because they deal with gender identity or sexual orientation.

“We put them in the back circle of the exhibits. They are not in the field trip zone that we’re providing to educators, even though some of them were created by students,” said Ben Jewell-Plocher, the organization’s learning and engagement director.

The organization is trying to navigate the Parental Rights in Education law (dubbed “Don’t Say Gay”). Wertheimer said a lack of clarity in the law has added to fear among individual teachers and whole schools about whether their participation in the program could violate the law and cost them their jobs.

Sylvia Tirado, an 11th grade student from High Wycombe, United Kingdom, received the best-in-show student artwork award for “Are My Roots Showing?” in the 2024 Embracing Our Differences exhibit.

“It’s a fear of the really unclear situation where they don’t know where the guardrails are,” Wertheimer said. “We don’t want them to put themselves in a position where they could lose their livelihood.”

It is an ironic problem that Embracing Our Differences, which was created to celebrate diversity, equity and inclusion faces state law that limits such ideas in schools and government offices.

“We do feel like, unfortunately, a lot of individuals and especially politicians have decided to attack those terms, equity, inclusion and diversity and make them into these polarizing and political terms that they clearly are not,” Wertheimer said. “And I don’t believe most people believe they are divisive.”

She noted that companies around the world have been focusing on such values and initiatives. “To see our local and state government use them as things to divide us is saddening, but at the same time, it’s much of the reason why we have to keep teaching this, that love and kindness will win in the end.”

“Pieces of You” was created by Brianna Medina and 11th-grade student at Florida Virtual School in Indialantic for the Embracing Our Differences program.

Winning entries

Each year, jurors select four $2,000 awards for art work and the quotations, divided among adults and students. (Student winners split their prizes with their schools.) Visitors will vote on people’s choice awards which will be announced for both Sarasota and St. Petersburg.

The Best-in-Show Adult artwork award went to Samantha Dennis of Woodbridge, Canada for “‘Hand’le with Care,” featuring four hands of different colors and abilities cradling colorful lights in the shape of a heart. Sylvia Tirado, an 11th-grade student from High Wycombe, United Kingdom won the Best-in-Show Student artwork award for “Are My Roots Showing?” featuring a young woman of color looking at the dark roots under her dyed blond hair.

The Best-in-Show Adult quotation award went to Md. Faisal Arefin from Rajshahi, Bangladesh for the phrase: “I stand against hatred with love, prejudice with acceptance and ignorance with knowledge.” The Best-in-Show Student quotation award goes to Jessie Ochsendorf, a seventh grader at Pine View School in Osprey, who wrote: “Spread kindness like the world depends on it… because it does.”

Fifth-grade students at Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, working with art teacher Melissa Shaw, created the art work “Friends Untangle Life’s Knots” for the Embracing our Differences exhibit.

Wertheimer said all the selections “exemplify our vision and mission, but they are relating to people on different levels, depending on their experiences.

Jewell-Plocher said docents talk with school groups about “windows and mirrors in the exhibit. There can be a mirror of yourself in one image or a window into somebody else’s experiences.”

The city of Sarasota, which is finishing up work on a new playground near the Bayfront Park exhibition site, has added security cameras in the area that will better protect the show, Wertheimer said.

The challenges the group has faced in the last year indicated that Embracing Our Differences is “more important than ever before,¨ Wertheimer said. “It is still so needed for people of all ages to focus on the positivity, to focus on coming together and focus on our shared humanity and most of us do want happiness and kindness to prevail.”