Sandra Q. Firmin

Sandra Firmin, Director and Chief Curator of the CU Art Museum. (Photo by Glenn Asakawa/University of Colorado)

Sandra Q. Firmin is the director and chief curator of the University of Colorado Art Museum, where she has served since April 2014. She thrives on collaboration in fashioning programs that create a sense of community and energize the academic and social missions of CU Boulder. At the CU Art Museum, Sandra oversees the biennial Artist-in-Residence program that invites artists to create new work in collaboration with campus and external communities. Residents have included Millie Chen, Janelle Iglesias and Mary Mattingly. Her recent contemporary exhibitions have addressed a range of issues from human interaction with our surroundings to cultural belonging and identity to the mystical and sublime in art. 
 
Sandra has organized critically-acclaimed contemporary art exhibitions. At the University at Buffalo, she co-curated the traveling exhibition Kim Jones: A Retrospective (with Julie Joyce), accompanied by the catalogue “Mudman: The Odyssey of Kim Jones” (MIT Press, 2006). In 2010, Sandra organized Artpark: 1974–1984, an exhibition and publication (Princeton Architectural Press, 2010) chronicling the seminal years of an innovative residency program located in Lewiston, New York. She is currently organizing Tim Whiten: Tools of Conveyance, which will open at the CU Art Museum in Fall 2020.
 
In her tenure at the CU Art Museum, Sandra led a campaign to acquire the Sharkive, an internationally important collection of contemporary prints and related materials created in the studio of Bud and Barbara Shark. Artists include Enrique Chagoya, Red Grooms, Hung Liu and Betty Woodman, among others.
 
Sandra holds a master’s degree from Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies and has served as a trustee on the board of the Association of Art Museum Curators.