In 2020, The Ringling received a significant gift of art from Murray Bring and Kay Delaney Bring, in support of the modern and contemporary collection. This exhibition presents selections from this gift in dialogue with rarely seen works from The Ringling's collection.

Ballroom Florida was the most dazzling of Tokyo’s jazz-age dance halls. A new kind of venue in Japan in the 1920s–30s, dance halls offered a stylish space for young people to hear the latest music performed by live bands, practice dance steps with a skilled partner, and mix with like-minded peers.

Featuring costumes and photographs on loan from the Stonewall National Museum and Archives, the exhibition showcases the accomplishments of individuals from the local Suncoast community and from the nation at large, highlighting famous drag personalities like RuPaul and John Waters.

This exhibition features a selection of works from the museum’s Stanton B. and Nancy W. Kaplan Collection of Photography. This collection, includes over 1000 photographic objects and images, representing some of the most important photo-based artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Matsui Kōsei (Japanese, 1927–2003) is known for his delicately marbleized, unglazed vessels. Techniques of neriage or agateware, as these ceramics are known, were used from China’s Tang dynasty (618–907 C.E.) but have few precedents in Japan.

The exhibition’s title, The world is just so small, now, is borrowed from the first stanza of a poem by Brazilian artist Abraão Batista. Bringing together additional prints, watercolors, and drawings by artists working on paper, the exhibition highlights the medium as fundamental to the artists’ practice.