New Art Museum director to take the helm
Sandra Q. Firmin, curator of UB Art Galleries at SUNY Buffalo, has been named the director of the University of Colorado Boulder Art Museum.
Firmin will begin as director on April 21, replacing interim director Stephen Martonis.
“The Art Museum is well-regarded for excellence in its exhibitions and interpretive programs and is housed in a new state-of-the-art facility,” Firmin said this week.
“I look forward to furthering its already impressive reputation on campus as an interdisciplinary hub for faculty and students, as well as partnering with community organizations and art institutions throughout the Denver-Boulder-Aspen corridor.”
Firmin has been Curator of the UB Art Galleries at SUNY Buffalo since 2003. She holds an M.A. from Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies, and was awarded a Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative Fellowship at Arcadia University Art Gallery.
Firmin co-curated the traveling exhibition “Kim Jones: A Retrospective” (with Julie Joyce). The exhibition was accompanied by the catalogue “Mudman: The Odyssey of Kim Jones,” co-edited with Joyce.
In 2010, Firmin organized Artpark: 1974–1984, an exhibition and publication chronicling the seminal years of an innovative residency program located in Lewiston, N.Y., just north of Niagara Falls.
At the UB Art Galleries, Firmin has established an annual residency program in which artists are presented with an empty gallery to transform over time while open to the public. These commissioned projects aim to forge meaningful interactions between artists and diverse groups of people while acknowledging a turn toward research-based site-specific approaches in contemporary art that have at their core experimentation and ephemerality.
Firmin is co-chairing (with Julian Cox) the Association of Art Museum Curators’ annual conference, which will be held in Detroit this year, where she will be moderating a panel on “Urban Ecologies and Cultural Exchange.”
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