Jordana Pomeroy

FIU Frost Art Museum welcomes new director

Jordana Pomeroy took the reins in January as director at Florida International University’s Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum.

She comes to Miami from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where she was the executive director at Louisiana State University’s Museum of Art. Prior to that she worked at the National Museum of Women in the Arts for more than fifteen years. She was a curator of painting and sculpture and eventually chief curator. There she developed expertise in women’s art history and feminist art, though her academic background is 19th century European art.

Pomeroy earned her undergraduate degree from Bryn Mawr College and her PhD in art history from Columbia University.

At the Frost Art Museum Pomeroy succeeds Carol Damian, who was director and chief curator since the 2008 opening of its current 46,0000-square-foot building, designed by architect Yann Weymouth of Hellmuth Obata + Kassabaum.

The museum originally opened in 1977 as a small gallery of less than 3,000 square feet. It has grown to achieve local, national and international recognition as one of South Florida’s key cultural institutions. In 2001, the museum became an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution.

Pomeroy is looking forward to building on the Frost’s successes. “Miami is a city with great museums,” Pomeroy said. “I am excited about working with South Florida’s art community, as well as FIU faculty and the Frost’s staff to add to the contributions that this young museum already has made to the art world.”

At LSU Museum of Art, one of Pomeroy’s main goals was to find ways to attract more visitors to the museum. She said she will face the same challenge at the Frost Museum.

“It’s a bigger, more established museum, but it’s not located downtown,” she said. “It’s on a college campus, so the challenge will be to get people to come to the campus to visit the museum.

Pomeroy said the Frost Museum’s permanent collection is about the same size as LSU’s, but the Frost Museum focuses on art from Columbia and Latin America. “That will be another challenge — establishing a collecting plan,” Pomeroy said. “It was the same challenge I had at LSU, deciding who we want to be and doing our best to achieve that.”

Pomeroy expressed an interest in exploring the intersection of cultures, traditions and mediums. “I expect you will see exhibitions that reach across cultures and chronology and disciplines to explore rich areas of nexus,” she said. “I am interested in what happens when cultures collide.”