Opening on November 17 at the Sarasota Art Museum is an exhibition of miniature paintings titled Contemplating Vermeer. SAM Executive Director Virginia Shearer thinks this show will really blow people’s minds.
“I, myself, am a museum junkie,” said Shearer. “I’m the kind of person who gets that fear of missing out when I learn that the big Monet exhibition is at the National Gallery, and if I can’t make it to D.C., I’m super, super sad. This exhibition, Contemplating Vermeer, is all about that.”
In the summer of 2023, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam hosted a monumental exhibition of Johannes Vermeer’s masterpieces. The museum gathered and showcased 28 of the 35 paintings that have been attributed to the enigmatic Dutch painter. Shearer couldn’t attend.
“People from all over the world were flying in,” Shearer recounts. “Tickets were impossible to get, and they were going to see The Girl with the Pearl Earring,” which is probably our most famous Vermeer, among others. In that group of visitors was a wonderful artist named Joe Fig.”
