St. Petersburg’s 26-acre waterfront pier is dominated by a billowing 72-foot-tall aerial sculpture that’s composed of more than 1.6 million knots and 180 miles of twine. Measuring 424 feet long by 240 feet wide, “Bending Arc” is just one of Janet Echelman’s building-sized, block-long public artworks.

“Janet Echelman was raised in the Tampa area,” noted Virginia Shearer, the executive director of the Sarasota Art Museum. “She is known for working with engineers, architects, designers, and making large-scale netted sculptural works, soft sculptures that are suspended from buildings across football fields, raining down from ceilings.” Shearer couldn’t be more excited for patrons to see Echelman’s first-ever museum exhibition, “Radical Softness.”

“’Radical Softness plays with how colorful an

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