Atlantic World Art Fair: Curator's Choice by Isolde Brielmaier and Franklin Sirmans

Isolde Brielmaier, Assistant Professor in the Department of Photography, Imaging and Emerging Media at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and Franklin Sirmans, director of the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), make their selections from the Atlantic World Art Fair

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Isolde Brielmaier is Assistant Professor in the Department of Photography, Imaging and Emerging Media at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts where she focuses on contemporary art, global visual culture, as well as media and immersive technology as platforms within which to re-think storytelling and the politics of representation. She is also the inaugural Curator-at-Large at the International Center of Photography (ICP) and previously oversaw the arts and cultural programming at the Oculus at Westfield World Trade Center. Isolde has written extensively on contemporary art and culture and is the author of Culture as Catalyst (2020). She has served as curator at several institutions including the Guggenheim Museum and the Bronx Museum. Among her distinctions, she has received fellowships from the Mellon and Ford foundations as well as the Social Science Research Council (SSRC). She serves on the Board of Trustees of the New Museum as well as the Women’s Prison Association. She holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Franklin Sirmans has been the director of the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) since fall 2015. Since coming to PAMM, he has overseen the acquisition of more than a thousand works of art by donation or purchase. At PAMM, Sirmans has pursued his vision of PAMM as “the people’s museum,” representing a Miami lens, by strengthening existing affiliate groups such as the PAMM Fund for African American Art and creating the International Women’s Committee and the Latin American and Latinx Art Fund. Sirmans has organized Toba Khedoori (2017) and he was cocurator of The World’s Game: Futbol and Contemporary Art (2018). Prior to his appointment he was the department head and curator of contemporary art at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) from 2010 until 2015. At LACMA Sirmans organized Toba Khedoori; Noah Purifoy: Junk Dada; Variations: Conversations in and around Abstract Painting; Fútbol: The Beautiful Game; and Ends and Exits: Contemporary Art from the Collections of LACMA and The Broad Art Foundation. From 2006 to 2010 he was curator of modern and contemporary art at The Menil Collection in Houston where he organized several exhibitions including NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith; Maurizio Cattelan: Is Their Life Before Death?; and Vija Celmins: Television and Disaster, 1964–1966. From 2005 to 2006 Sirmans was a curatorial advisory committee member at MoMA/PS1. He was the artistic director of Prospect.3 New Orleans from 2012 until 2014. He was awarded the 2007 David C. Driskell Prize, administered by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.