Sandra Q. Firmin is the director of the CU Art Museum. She thrives on collaboration in fashioning programs that create a sense of community and energize the academic and social missions of CU Boulder. 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. In 2021, she organized Tim Whiten: Tools of Conveyance.
Sandra has organized critically-acclaimed contemporary art exhibitions. At her previous position 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.
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 is currently a Board Member and the Mountain Plains Regional Representative of the Association of Academic Museum and Galleries. She 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.
Please note: our curators do not review un-solicited exhibition proposals.