Franklin Sirmans arrives in Miami as the new director of the Pérez Art Museum

A contemporary-art world ‘rock star’, Franklin Sirmans arrives in Miami as the new director of the Pérez Art Museum intent on creating a focal point for the city’s creativity. He spoke to Monocle about Art Basel’s ongoing importance and the opportunities ahead.

Few people in the art world are as respected and popular as Franklin Sirmans. The 46-year-old has a knack for introducing new audiences to art by fusing it with pop culture, as he did in a 2002 exhibition that focused on hip-hop and contemporary art at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, or during 2014’s football World Cup, when he curated an exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) that examined football’s portrayal in art. One museum trustee has even hailed Sirmans as “a rock star in the contemporary-art world”. Sirmans has curated exhibitions on everyone from Basquiat to Noah Purifoy and even managed the task of doing double duty as LACMA's contemporary-art head and curator while serving as artistic director for the 2014 Prospect.3 biennial in New Orleans. Previously, Sirmans worked as a curator at the Menil Collection in Houston and for the past five years at LACMA until the Pérez Art Museum Miami (Pamm) convinced him to make the move out east with his family to become the contemporary-art museum’s director.

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Photographer Ryan Stone

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