Comments (0) Best Curator - 2008
Franklin Sirmans, Curator of Modern and Contemporary art at The Menil Collection
Franklin Sirmans, Curator of Modern and Contemporary art at The Menil Collection
1515 Sul Ross
Houston, TX 77006
713-525-9400
Franklin Sirmans left New York for Houston, and NY's loss is Houston's gain. With his exhibition, "NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith," Sirmans, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Menil Collection, has brought the de Menils' legacy of spirituality in art into the 21st century. No staid, meditative Rothko Chapel experience, "NeoHooDoo" was diverse, funky and polytheistic. It also had a lot of women in it. (The late Mrs. de Menil, for all her progressive stances in politics, art and civil rights, was quite dismissive of her own sex and all but ignored work by women artists.) Sirmans is also reinvigorating the permanent collection. His "Everyday People," an exhibition of photographs drawn from The Menil Collection, was a nod to "The Family of Man" exhibition that originally inspired the de Menils to begin collecting photography. But whereas "The Family of Man" was humanistic in a simplistic, idealistic and hokey manner, Sirmans's selections of images presented a blunt, quirky, realistic and nonetheless moving view of the world.
