The Pérez Art Museum Miami in Florida has named José Carlos Diaz its new senior director of curatorial affairs and chief curator. Diaz will begin in his role October 13, succeeding Gilbert Vicario, who departed the institution this past February.
Diaz has been deputy director of art at the Seattle Art Museum (SAM) since July 2022, where he oversaw curatorial programs, as well as those at the Seattle Asian Art Museum and Olympic Sculpture Park. He oversaw the rollout of the “Calder at SAM” initiative, which built on Jon and Kim Shirley’s gift of 48 Calder works worth $200 million in 2023. That gift was the subject of a 2023–24 exhibition that Diaz curated, “Calder: In Motion, The Shirley Family Collection.”
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At SAM, he also curated a solo show for Anila Quayyum Agha and a long-term installation for FriendsWithYou, and he served as the institutional curator for traveling shows for Suchitra Mattai and Hokusai.
The appointment is a homecoming for Diaz, a Miami native who previously worked at PAMM when it was still known as the Miami Art Museum. He was also a curatorial intern at another local institution, the Rubell Collection (now the Rubell Museum), early in his career, during the early 2000s. Around this time, he also founded Worm-Hole Laboratory, an alternative art space sited in his apartment.
“Miami has changed so much,” Diaz told ARTnews. “The city has certainly grown, artists have moved there, and a new generation of artists have developed since two decades ago when Art Basel started. One of the success stories is that it’s become this sophisticated art metropolis.”
Diaz returned to Miami working as curator of exhibitions at the Bass Museum of Art from 2013 to 2016, after holding curatorial roles at Tate Liverpool and the Liverpool Biennial. In 2016 Diaz was appointed chief curator at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, where he stayed for six years before leaving for his current role at the Seattle Art Museum.
In an interview, PAMM director Franklin Sirmans said Diaz will bring “a fresh eye and vision.” Sirmans characterized him as an “incredibly well-rounded curator” who is “generous in terms of his curatorial leadership,” adding that “he has a unique vantage point in thinking about what Miami needs from what we like to believe is its flagship institution, PAMM.”
At PAMM, Diaz said he is interested in growing the collection. The museum’s holdings have steadily expanded over the past six years, with the museum now in possession of 3,500 objects. One of the collection’s strengths is Latin American and Latinx art, particularly from the Caribbean.
“It’s growing rapidly, and José’s wisdom and guidance is going to be the exciting part about how that collection evolves,” Sirmans said of PAMM’s permanent collection. “I can’t think of anyone better to think through those things together and with José at this point in time.”
From a curatorial perspective, Diaz said the museum’s exhibition slate must have a “global perspective,” particularly in terms of conversations about art from the Global South, which PAMM has a history of doing. Similarly, he said he was interested in “considering how PAMM can also represent other types of exhibitions that are not just focused around fine art,” like fashion, design, and architecture.
Diaz also said that he thinks of an institution like PAMM as a “third space, where people can come, not just for the art, but for meeting their friends or programmatic things like music, dancing, yoga, that sort of thing,” he said. “I love making art experiences as accessible as possible [and] making those experiences welcoming.”
Sirmans added, “José brings something to the conversation that so many are interested in, in terms of how we talk about art in a global fashion [and] how can we make art more a part of people’s lives on a day-to-day basis here.”