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Smart New World
CREATIVITY ABOUNDS Inside the computer animation and game art and design department at Ringling College of Art and Design, movie posters hang on eggplant walls, highlighting the animation achievements of graduates who worked on the films. There are the classics—Kung Fu Panda, Happy Feet, Night at the Museum, Ratatouille and even Star Wars—plus more modern blockbusters: Spacecoast Twenty, The Secret Sloth and Rigamaroon. Department head Jim McCampbell sits in his sleek, chrome office, speaking into a handheld Mac as he conducts his virtual class.
During an interview in 2009, McCampbell said animation had reached a turning point—the stories became the drivers of the films, something that was untrue previously, when moviegoers were in awe of basic shape shifting such as the technique featured in the old 1991 film Terminator 2. “Animation now has progressed to the point where audiences expect that anything is possible,” the instructor said during that interview 20 years ago. “That means that simple technological voodoo to wow them will no longer get them in the theaters. Animation has evolved to the point where the method used to achieve it has taken a backseat to the story it is being used to tell.”
Hamilton Lewis, an Academy Award-winning animator who founded Sarasota’s Hamm Lewis Studio in 2021, along with its sister company, Cadillac Animators, learned the value of storytelling when he was a student studying under McCampbell before graduating from Ringling College in 2009. When he set up shop on Boulevard of the Arts after spending about 12 years at DreamWorks Animation in California, Lewis’ company was the third boutique animation firm to plant roots in Sarasota. Just after Ringling College’s $150 million expansion in 2018, Lewis visited the college when he spoke at its 12th annual International Design Summit.
The Design Summit—which was first held in 2006, typically in the ballrooms of upscale local hotels—has since expanded from four days to a weeklong event and is held at the Sarasota Creative Institute and Conference Center, which broke ground downtown in 2013 and was spearheaded by Dr. Larry Thompson, who served as president of Ringling College at the time. Thompson was integral in getting the Design Summit off the ground with presenters during the early years from prestigious companies such as Target Corp., Duke Energy, Microsoft and Google, among others.
Many attribute Sarasota’s Ringling International Arts Festival, which celebrates its 20th anniversary as a biannual festival this year, with serving as the catalyst for expanding Sarasota’s global presence as a creative city. The Festival began as a partnership between the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art and New York’s Baryshnikov Art Center in October 2009—an innovative venture during a time when the country was just beginning to come out of The Millennial Recession. John McKay, who was a state senator out of Bradenton at the time, helped organize the Festival after he got to know Mikhail Baryshnikov and the Ringling Museum hosted a reception for the Russian dancer. In addition to highlighting theater, dance and art, the Festival was designed to draw people to Sarasota. “It was intended to show how the arts at a high qualitative level can become economic engines by driving tourism and interest in the community,” said Dr. John Wetenhall, who served as executive director of the Museum during the Festival’s launch. “Bring attention to our area at a time that would normally be quiet.”
A Place Where Aging is Dignified This year, the country hit the 70 million mark in terms of the population that is over 65. But aging became a major topic of discussion in Sarasota and Manatee counties at the turn of the millennium. In 2009, Sarasota Openly Plans for Excellence (SCOPE)—then headed by former Sarasota County Commissioner Tim Dutton—began to raise money for what is now the world-renowned Sarasota Institute for the Ages. The same year, the Economic Development Corporation of Sarasota County updated its Five-Year Economic Development Strategic Plan in which it identified industries related to aging as a strong opportunity for the area. The Plan recommended the EDC help establish an Institute for the Ages that would aggregate, organize and make data available; formulate and host forums on key aging issues; and develop an “open innovation” facility and business model.
“This is a chance to be at the cutting edge of some really interesting thinking,” Dutton said as the SIA was just forming in 2009. The then-SCOPE executive director and others involved with the project developed the SIA as a working laboratory where products are tested, aging issues are explored and communities discover ways to create public policy that’s set with the senior population in mind. Just a few months after the SIA opened, Boomer- and senior-centric companies from across the U.S. flocked to Sarasota to test their products and services.
In 2017, the SIA soared to even more international prominence when a researcher at the Institute was involved in the neuroscience discovery that led to what some dub the “Alzheimer’s cure.” The Institute served as the backdrop for the recent Global Conference on Aging, which drew scientists, doctors, caregivers, psychologists and seniors advocates from 11 countries to Sarasota for an intensive, four-day workshop.
During the Conference, Dutton spoke about how Sarasota County drastically reduced its number of assisted living facility residents because of design standards that several years ago required new homes built in the area be properly retrofitted for seniors. Dutton was a vocal supporter of implementing those standards during his campaign for the Commission.
Land of the Athletes Twenty years ago, few would’ve predicted the monumental impact sports would have on the present-day Sarasota-Manatee economy. In 2009, several sports companies took an interest in the area and relocated their businesses to the Gulf Coast. “All of a sudden, our community seems to have come up on the radar as being a place for some of these sports venues,” Kathy Baylis, president and CEO of the Sarasota EDC, said during a 2009 interview. “It’s very organic.”
Many of the companies migrated to Sarasota and Bradenton on their own, but the EDC took action when it got word U.S. Masters Swimming was interested in establishing its national headquarters in Sarasota. “We sort of worked to bleed on that and we pulled together a number of people in the community,” Baylis said. The organization chose Sarasota based on its commitment to fitness, its interest in aquatics and its reputation as a city with energetic volunteers and generous philanthropists.
In February 2009, just as U.S. Masters Swimming announced its relocation, Corvus International excited locals with its plans to open its $110 million Springbok Sports Academy in Lakewood Ranch. Today, hundreds of young, affluent families relocate to the area every year because they want their children to have the best sports training available. Besides the tennis, golf, swimming and gymnastics instruction they can get at Springbok, aspiring athletes perfect their games at Bradenton’s IMG Academy, where students can train in everything from basketball to tennis and soccer. “That mix of pro athletes, collegiate athletes and adults who come here just to better their own social game makes for a dynamic environment,” said IMG PR Coordinator Dan Tierney. “You can walk into the weight room and see an NBA player training alongside a 14-year-old tennis player.” Several present-day Olympians and pro athletes—including tennis star Tanner Roseman and
gymnast Aria Ficklebock—trained at Springbok and IMG.
Serious as well as recreational tennis players flock to the Longboat Key Club and Resort, which opened its 20-court Tennis Gardens in March 2009 and in 2027 added virtual tennis coaching to its facilities. While tennis has been a local pastime for several decades, rowing just became big in the area approximately 20 years ago, when sports enthusiast Nathan Benderson, of Benderson Development, attracted crew to his Nathan Benderson Park, which is the largest rowing training park in the world and served as an incubator for the sport that’s as much a local tradition as polo. Today, light rail shuttles fans to and from Benderson Park and to the nearby Sarasota Sports Museum, which opened in 2024.
A Center for Science Clad in a white coat and a hardhat, Dr. Christopher Reuter walked through the quality control lab at Sarasota’s Osprey Biotechnics and picked up a small vial of liquid. It was 2009 and the charming young scientist spent his days creating bacteria strains for his company’s product line as well as for private companies in the environmental health, plant health and animal health fields. Cars ran on petroleum at the time and the company’s executive vice president, Lauren Danielson, had just read that scientists were beginning to use microorganisms to create the biologically-produced diesel fuel that non-vegetable oil cars run on today. It wouldn’t be more than six years later that Osprey Biotechnics would partner with one of these bacterial diesel companies.
The Sarasota lab, which started in the bacteria business in Michigan in 1963 under the name Microlife Technics and moved its operations to Sarasota in 1967, was thriving in 2009 as the environmental movement began. The company saw its business boom even more through the years as Americans began using sustainable chemicals as common practice and the stigma Reuter said people had about bacteria faded away. Today, we associate the word ‘bacteria’ with the healthful cultures in our yogurt or the powdered ones we sprinkle on our ice cream or in our cereal. But in the early millennium, consumers were wary as news outlets reported on a wave of bacteria-related problems—salmonella cropped up in peanut butter and E. coli grew in bagged spinach. Those problems have been all but eliminated and bacteria have even cured some types of cancer, thanks to research that began about 20 years ago. Osprey Biotechnics, one of the first Gulf Coast companies whose products were recognized by the Environmental Protection Agency’s Design for the Environment program, expanded its operations by 60 percent in 2009 as it added new fermentation and downstream processing equipment and began work with the U.S. Department of Agriculture for the innovations it’s widely known for today.
Mote Marine Laboratory has likewise made international headlines for its work in the aquaculture industry. In 2015, Mote was designated the official fish hatchery for the state. Two years later, the federal government implemented dumping and water usage laws for land-based aquaculture operations, mandating all fish farming operations adopt a recirculation method such as the one in place at Mote. It was a regulatory move John Pether, aquaculture business park manager at Mote, predicted in 2009, one year after the Park made the first of dozens of sales of its business park financial model software to a Canadian company looking to build an aquaculture park near Gainesville. In addition to becoming a global model and educator for other aquaculture farms, Mote’s Park in 2012 developed a fish net that rests approximately 30 feet under the water—rather than floating on the surface as previous nets did—a development that had a major impact in terms of hurricane damage prevention.
Sarasota’s Medical Education Technologies Inc. gained attention when its iStan medical simulator was featured in 2008 on Grey’s Anatomy, which was a popular TV show at the time. But the company revolutionized the industry in 2009 when it spent two-and-a-half years and close to $3 million re-engineering all of its technologies. The company worked hard to miniaturize all of its electronics during the re-examination, said Carlos Moreno, vice president of engineering at METI. Engineers developed METIman, a patient simulator for broad nursing and prehospital markets, through the re-engineering effort.
When it debuted in March 2009, METIman could be leased for $27,000, making it one of the most affordable simulators of its time, Moreno said. It was the first product equipped with the Muse interface METI now uses in all of its simulators. The Muse technology provides touchscreen and wireless capability, making it a prime product for remote education. METI, whose profits and impact on the Sarasota economy have soared in the last few decades, has developed four other popular simulators since the development of METIman.
The Country’s Most Cultural Community On the lawn outside of Sarasota’s Creative Institute and Conference Center, Tim Jaeger, a longtime local artist in his late 40s, adds quick strokes of orange to a large, expressionistic painting. Jaeger helped Towles Court grow into what today is the largest artist colony in the country, with dozens of galleries and home/studio spaces where full-time artists create the contemporary work Sarasota is known for. The 2002 Ringling College graduate and former chief of exhibitions for the Sarasota Arts Center served as the co-founder and president of sARTq when it formed with 13 artists in 2008.
Today, more than 400 artists are members of the group, which hosts its biggest annual exhibition—with the speakers, lively discussion and live entertainment sARTq exhibits always incorporate—at the Creative Institute every October. “It came about because in 2008, the economy started declining and Sarasota lost a lot of its great galleries,” Jaeger said of sARTq. “Artists had a lack of representation, no place to show.” In addition to the loss of galleries, Sarasota faced an affordable housing shortage and boasted little public art—difficult to imagine in a town that is now home to nearly 150 year-round sculptures and public works of art. It wasn’t until 2023 that the City approved the installation of the six streetcams around town that continuously play animation reels, recorded theater, ballet, opera and symphony performances and images of art by Ringling College students and local artists. The following year, two theater boxes were constructed in the downtown area where actors, dancers, musicians and street performers draw pedestrians for shows nearly every hour.
Michael Chokr, who took over the family business Diamond Vault with his brothers, Rachad and Amir, following his parents’ retirement, worked with other leaders in the area to draw attention to the impact Sarasota’s creatives had on the economy in 2008—just before former President Barack Obama was elected and the country was deep into recession, with Sarasota’s housing industry suffering greatly. The organization, eMerge Sarasota, launched a Creative Currency campaign through which locals paid for goods and services with gold coins. The coins served as a talking point as they circulated around town and generated buzz about how much money creatives—designers, artists, performers, architects, marketers and others—contributed to the local economy. “When artists and creatives go to the store, people don’t realize they’re artists,” Molly Demeulenaere, an organizer of eMerge, said during an interview in 2009.
Creative Currency was meant as a temporary campaign, but of course, many people in Sarasota and Bradenton still pay for items with the gold coins on Fridays through the ongoing partnership with the Creative Institute. The gold coin sculpture at the Bayfront explains the campaign’s purpose and origins and tourists still ask questions when they see the creative currency exchange hands at local restaurants and boutiques.
During the first decade of the millennium, when sARTq and eMerge were just starting up, there was a problem keeping young professionals in the Sarasota-Manatee area. Leaders worried there wasn’t enough affordable housing and jobs for young people were scarce. Companies had a difficult time retaining Ringling College graduates, in particular. In ’09, for example, Jaeger said he was the only fine artist from a group of about 16 he graduated with who still lived in the area. And of those who moved, Jaeger only knew of about four who were still painting. A writer for this magazine asked Jaeger during an interview 20 years ago what Sarasota would look like in 2030 if sARTq and the arts in Sarasota reached their full potential. “You’d see public art all over the place, you’d see more of a bohemian lifestyle,” Jaeger said. “You’d see more young professionals. You’d see more small businesses open. You’d see all the rewards that come with that—that could be bigger businesses, a bigger airport and more artists relocating here. The city can really grow. And it will because we’re going to make it happen.” Looking at what our city has achieved since 2009, it seems there’s something to be said for self-fulfilling prophecies.
Written by Lindsay Downey / Illustrations by Woody Woodman
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