Backstory: Clowning around on Florida's 'Culture Coast'

The dust-up over the life-size clown statues on sidewalks in this resort city got nasty even before pranksters made off with "When Pigs Fly" and "Ra Ra Shish Boom Ba," two of the 42-pound figures.

Long before the first molds were cast, the city's own Public Art Committee vexed municipal leaders by withholding its support, calling the idea of grinning fiberglass clowns on street corners a fulsome display of bad taste with no place on Florida's so-called "Cultural Coast." A portrait artist took to The Tampa Tribune op-ed page to knock his fellow Sarasotans for embracing their "inner Orlando." The Sarasota Herald Tribune, returning fire, accused the critics – local painters and sculptors, mostly – of anticlown snootiness.

"If Picasso can turn a bicycle seat into sculpture," the newspaper editorialized, "some clever soul can find a way to transform fiberglass clowns into sophisticated art."

Then came the vandals. Since the brightly painted, 6-foot-tall statues debuted on in October, at least two dozen have been attacked or kidnapped in what a police spokesman calls "random acts of criminal mischief." Clowns have been beheaded. Limbs have been snapped off. Fires have been lit between floppy clown shoes, turning fiberglass legs into bubbling goo. And two clowns were wrenched off their 300-pound concrete bases and stolen.

One, "Ra Ra Shish Boom Ba," a Moorish-themed clown with a fez, handlebar mustache, and elaborate ankle-length caftan, is still missing and may be, some think, at the bottom of Sarasota Bay. (The US Coast Guard has said that two crewmen stole the statue, and has paid $3,500 for a replacement clown.)

How a civic-minded public art project could have gotten this out of hand is a question a lot of people in this Gulf Coast city of 54,000 are asking. "Why would anyone do this?" asks Ken Shelin, one of two city commissioners who wore a red nose to a news conference for the exhibit last year. "And why would anybody do this to a clown?"

At first blush – or rouged cheek – the "Clowning Around Town" exhibit would seem as likely a flashpoint here as, say, a display of stylized surfboards along the beaches of southern California. Sarasota had until 1960 been the famed winter home of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. John Ringling's bayfront mansion and circus museum remain big tourist draws, plaques in a local park honor circus greats, and there's still a Ringling Boulevard, a Ringling Causeway, and a circus- training program for schoolchildren.

And the Clowning Around Town exhibit was sponsored by Tidewell Hospice and Palliative Care, a large nonprofit agency here, which commissioned the statues and plans to auction them in May as a fundraiser for its programs for grieving and sick children.

But no sooner had city commissioners sent in the clowns than the pies started flying. The reasons for the exhibit's woes remain a subject of fierce debate here. But most people blame some combination of poor planning, clown phobia, and a growing population of affluent retirees with less of a soft spot for the city's circus past.

Gone are the days when working-class tourists flocked to Sarasota to watch acrobats somersault across Lido Beach on their Sundays off; when an out-of-makeup Emmett Kelly could be seen shopping at the local grocery; and when Gottlieb and Alfreda Fischer, "The Tallest Married Couple on Earth," ran The Giants Motel.

"Everyplace you went in Sarasota in those days, you could hardly go down the street without seeing something from the circus in the yards: a rigging, a trailer, a trapeze, a wire for practicing," recalls Jackie LeClaire, a member of the International Clown Hall of Fame who became a Ringling Brothers clown here in 1945, at age 16.

Nowadays, the landscape is dominated by peach- and salmon-hued condo high-rises where many entry-level units start at $1 million. "I feel like I'm someplace on the moon," says Mr. LeClaire.

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