Franklin Sirmans: Museum director cites major growth in Miami’s arts scene

Since becoming the Pérez Art Museum Miami’s director, Franklin Sirmans has created new programming, projects and initiatives that are setting the museum apart from other international art institutions.

From establishing The Caribbean Cultural Institute to launching the PAMM TV streaming service, Mr. Sirmans says his goal as director is to promote artistic expression and the exchange of ideas.

Back in October 2015, Mr. Sirmans came to PAMM from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), where he had served as department head and curator of contemporary art and was the artistic director of the 2014 Prospect New Orleans biennial exhibition, P3: Notes for Now. The exhibition presented the work of more than 50 established and emerging contemporary artists in 18 venues across the city of New Orleans.

As a curator, writer and editor, Mr. Sirmans has established himself as one of the leading voices in contemporary art. At LACMA, he curated Noah Purifoy: Junk Dada, as well as Fútbol: The Beautiful Game, and oversaw major retrospectives by Glenn Ligon and Blinky Palermo. He also served as the US editor of Flash Art and editor-in-chief of ArtAsiaPacific, and he has written and edited numerous artist and exhibition catalogues.

Before heading to Los Angeles, Mr. Sirmans served as the curator of modern and contemporary art at the Menil Collection in Houston, and before that he was a curatorial advisor at MoMA PS1 and a lecturer at Princeton University and Maryland Institute College of Art.

Some of his notable projects include the exhibition Basquiat at the Brooklyn Museum (2005); Make it Now: New Sculpture in New York at SculptureCenter (2005), and One Planet Under A Groove: Contemporary Art and Hip Hop, which traveled from the Bronx Museum of the Arts to the Walker Art Center, Spelman College Art Gallery in Atlanta; and Villa Stuck, Munich (2001-2003). He was also the 2007 recipient of the David C. Driskell Prize presented by the High Museum.

Mr. Sirmans assumed leadership just shy of two years after PAMM moved into its new Downtown Miami bayfront building. Designed by world-renowned architects Herzog & de Meuron, the state-of-the-art building features 200,000 square feet of indoor and outdoor program space with flexible galleries and a waterfront restaurant and bar.

“Miami has grown significantly in the past eight years and possesses unparalleled diversity and energy, qualities which define contemporary art and PAMM’s mission of advancing public knowledge and appreciation of art, architecture, and design and reflecting the diverse community of its pivotal geographic location at the crossroads of the Americas and in a world that presents us with new challenges every day and presents us with barriers to understanding each other in meaningful ways all the time,” he said.

Mr. Sirmans spoke with Miami Today Reporter Abraham Galvan.

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