America’s first museum dedicated to American art recently got an unlikely new director: Min Jung Kim, a native of South Korea.
The New Britain Museum of American Art, located in a verdant pocket of the postindustrial central Connecticut city that bears its name, welcomed Min Jung Kim recently as only the sixth director in the museum’s 112-year history. “It never would have occurred to me that I would become director of this country’s oldest American art museum,” says Kim, who moved to America from Seoul when she was 18 and became a citizen 10 years ago.
She began her art education in America at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts. In 1996 she joined the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in New York City, where she worked on international projects such as establishing partnerships with the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, Austria. She also helped expand the Guggenheim’s presence in Asia. Kim returns to New England after launching the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University.
Kim’s international background is, in fact, the perfect springboard for a conversation on what American art means and where it can go in a morphing, cosmopolitan nation of cultures and traditions that bleed together more than ever. Kim wants the museum to be a part of that conversation. “For me, the way I see it today, American art is less of a rigid geographical or ethnic classification,” Kim says.
The NBMAA spans three centuries of art, including the Hudson River school, American impressionism, and colonial-era portraits. It also boasts a notable collection of contemporary American art, including that of New England artists. The museum sits in the city’s west end abutting Walnut Hill Park, which was designed by nineteenth-century landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, who also designed Central Park.
Kim is coming on board at an exciting time for the NBMAA. This fall, a new three-floor, 17,000-square-foot wing opened with space for three art studios and nine additional galleries that include western art, early modernist works, realist works, and works donated by a number of lesser-known artists. The expansion helps position the museum as an anchor in a city aiming to be on the economic upswing.
“Art and culture is a biological need. All the more [reason] a museum such as the NBMAA [should] be considered an indispensable necessity for the community,” Kim says.
This piece originally appeared in the December 2015-January 2016 issue of Take magazine, available here.
