The Brooklyn Rail

Min Jung Kim has worked as a curator, director, and arts administrator since graduating from Wheaton College in 1992. Born and raised in Seoul, Min Jung Kim is currently the Barbara B. Taylor Director of the Saint Louis Art Museum, a post she has held since 2021. For this iteration of the Brooklyn Rail’s Director’s Series, Min Jung Kim joined Guggenheim President Emeritus Jennifer Stockman and Rail Consulting Editor Joachim Pissarro for a conversation that spans her time at Sotheby’s Korea, the Samsung Art Foundation and Ho-Am Art Gallery, the Guggenheim Museum, the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, and how all of these experiences have informed her life and work today.

Jennifer Stockman: Min Jung, it’s such a pleasure to reconnect with you after our five years together at the Guggenheim—though unfortunately we never had the chance to connect on a personal level. This conversation is a terrific opportunity to explore so many issues of mutual interest.

Joachim and I always find it fascinating to begin our museum director interviews by asking about your younger years. We believe those early experiences subtly shape career choices, creative ideation, and one’s entire life journey. Knowing you grew up in Seoul—now one of Asia’s preeminent cultural capitals—makes this especially compelling.

Could you share some of your earliest memories of art and culture that first sparked your passion for the field? And how does today’s explosive Seoul art scene—home to the Leeum, the National Museum of Korea, and a thriving global collector base—influence your perspective on museums worldwide?

Min Jung Kim: That’s a great question. As you mentioned, I was born and raised in Seoul, South Korea during a time of great political instability. We were under authoritarian rule, which effectively ended in 1987, a year that brought major democratic reform. But prior to that, there was indeed an environment in Seoul that is quite different from what people often envision Korea to be and look like today, including a very nascent building of a cultural infrastructure.

There were very few museums at the time. There were only a handful of national museums, and until the 1980s there were no private foundations or institutions. In 1987 there was a big shift and a political change in the government of Korea, and in 1988 Seoul hosted the Summer Olympics, which was really a watershed moment. It was also the year that the government decided to lift restrictions on overseas travel, and the year that I left Korea to come to the United States to attend Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts to pursue a liberal arts education, from which, to my delight, I discovered art history, a subject that I didn’t even know existed.

I had very little exposure to art and art museums while I was growing up in Korea, so to discover all of that in the United States was really a revelation. From the first moment that I took my art history 101 survey, I was hooked. I absolutely loved it and knew this was what I wanted to study and the field that I wanted to be in. After graduating college, I wanted to stay in the United States and continue my graduate studies, but I was persuaded by my parents to return to Korea.

My first job right out of school was with Sotheby’s Korea, but I knew very early on that what I really wanted to do was to work in a museum and a nonprofit institution. So I joined the Samsung Foundation of Culture and the Ho-Am Art Gallery. The Samsung Foundation was one of the first really solid foundations that was building on not only an extraordinary collection of Korean antiquities that it had and still has, but was also building a major modern and contemporary art collection and as such was bringing together a department to continue to grow this collection and build exhibitions and programs from which I learned a great deal as a young curator in the early nineties. The Ho-Am Art Gallery later on evolved to its current state, which is the Ho-Am Art Museum, and they have been a pioneering force in the development and growth of the Korean art field as a whole.

I left Korea in 1996 to move to New York and join the Guggenheim Museum. It has changed and transformed so much over the years, including this continued investment in building cultural infrastructure with the proliferation of both public and private foundations and institutions that have really shored up the Korean ecosystem, if you will. And as a result of that, to see the kind of increased exposure for Korean artists, to be more globally connected, to be more presented, appreciated, and eventually parts of both individual and museum collections, I think has really transformed Korea. So it’s quite thrilling to have seen it in its somewhat nascent stages in the 1990s to the institutionalization of contemporary art platforms in Korea today.

Joachim Pissarro: And were your parents supportive of these choices?

Kim: I have my parents’ support to be grateful for. I remember convincing my parents that I wanted to go to college in the United States, and I was describing this liberal arts education where you could take so many classes and try out different things, and you didn’t have to declare your major until your junior year. What a luxury and what a gift that was! And yet, after my first semester of my freshman year, I called my father and said, “I know exactly what I want to major in.” And he said, “I thought you were going to take all this time to take all these classes and figure out what you wanted?” And I said, “No, I know exactly what I want to do.” And he said, “What is it?” And I said, “Art history.” And there was this long silence at the other end of the phone, and I could hear him thinking, “Oh, boy, what? What is that? Does this now mean I’m going to have to financially support my daughter for the rest of her life?” But to their enormous credit, my parents were fully supportive of my interest and my passion—after graduation, I just had to come home and work for a few years.

They were perhaps thinking, well, maybe that was it, and she will stay in Korea. When I did in fact come back to the United States in 1996, essentially to work at the Guggenheim, it was initially not for a job. I was actually on my way to graduate school. While I was at the Samsung Foundation for Art and Culture as a young curator, I was given extraordinary opportunities to work on exhibitions and eventually curate shows of my own, but I kept yearning to return to the United States to get a master’s degree. I was so thrilled to have been accepted with a full scholarship to attend the Williams College graduate program in art history, the one school that I really wanted to go to.

I told Samsung that I was going to go back to school, and they said, “Well, can you work on one last exhibition? It’s a traveling show, so you really just need to do the coordination.” It was a show of masterpieces from the Guggenheim collection.

At the time, the renovation and the Gwathmey Siegel Kaufman’s addition prevented the Guggenheim from showing works, so much of its collection was on the road. When the collection came to Korea, I was the coordinating curator. Lisa Dennison, who was at the time chief curator, came to hang the show and said, “Min, I’ve been hearing a lot of great things about you from the team. How would you like to come and work at the Guggenheim? We are doing major international projects. We’re about to open a building in Bilbao, Spain. It’s currently under construction. We are developing a major exhibition called China: 5,000 Years. We’re looking for more international perspectives; how would you like to join the team?”

That was remarkable, to have been offered that as a possibility. Now, in my naiveté, I thought, well, how about I defer my plans to go to Williams College for a year. I’ll go to the Guggenheim, try that for a year or two, and then I’ll go back to school. But when I joined in 1996, a major expansion was taking place, and that one year led to twelve, thirteen years. When I say expansion, it was not just a physical expansion. Because, of course, we opened the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, and there were multiple simultaneous feasibility studies of potential museums in other parts of the world, including throughout Europe, Asia, Latin America, and eventually the Middle East. But there was also an explosive expansion programmatically, with the number of ambitious exhibitions that we were doing, from China: 5,000 Years, Brazil: Body and Soul, The Art of the Motorcycle, Giorgio Armani, the list goes on. There was a collaborative expansion as well, as there were many partnerships, including the content alliances among the Guggenheim; the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia; and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, Austria. It was a thrilling and exciting time to be in the front seat of all that was happening.

But I must say, there came a time, at least when I was there at its peak, that the Guggenheim was receiving something like five million visitors annually on a global level, which, of course, is incredible. But at the same time, it made me wonder: who are all these five million visitors who I’ve never met? I don’t know their names, I don’t know their faces. And it really, at least for me, started getting me thinking about the role of museums in the context of a particular place and community, and how we exist as a museum for our visitors and for our audience. To the question of place and community, it’s a very complex question to try and think through when you’re in a place like New York, which consists of multiple transient communities. So in thinking through this, it really sparked my curiosity, eventually to leave New York, which initially was very difficult, and to move to East Lansing, Michigan—

Stockman: You quickly mentioned so many interesting Guggenheim projects, including the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, Guggenheim Museum SoHo, plus there were a host of other “partnership” ventures that have since ended. And even after you left the Guggenheim, there were additional feasibility studies for Hong Kong, Rio de Janeiro, Vilnius, Guadalajara, Shanghai, and beyond.

I remember vividly that at nearly every board meeting, Thomas Krens—our visionary and dynamic director—would unveil breathtaking PowerPoint presentations showcasing these possibilities. He often engaged world-renowned architects to render seductive visions of what could be. It was an exciting time for us trustees, a sense of being at the vanguard of global cultural expansion.

Yet, for all the extraordinary work invested—the exhaustive studies, the many staff and trustee trips overseas to scout ideal locations and secure funding—it was disheartening that so many of these ambitious projects never saw the light of day. And speaking of light, can you shed any light on why these numerous initiatives ultimately failed, and what lessons we might draw from these experiences?

I also recall the sharp criticism leveled at the Guggenheim’s expansion plans at the time, with detractors likening it to a “McDonald’s franchise”—a chain interested in standardized outposts rather than fostering authentic cultural institutions. Was there truth to that charge, and how did it influence the trajectory of these efforts?

Kim: If there is something that I’ve witnessed and perhaps learned through the process, I think what makes certain projects more successful over others is essentially two things. One, I think, is the critical aspect of timing. I think the timing of certain projects is really fundamental to the potential success or failure of a particular project. There could be a variety of reasons why certain timings do not move forward, for political, economic, or cultural reasons. I think the other thing that’s really important is that every project really needs to have a local champion. You need to have someone or some entity that is fully behind it. Whether it’s the Guggenheim or any other cultural institution, unless that strong partnership is in place with a champion, I think the probability of its success continues to diminish over time.

Stockman: That’s such an important point—and one that resonates with my own experience. I remember evaluating potential museum projects around the world, where our very first priority was always to identify and secure powerful local champions early on: influential patrons, government leaders, or cultural visionaries who could rally support, navigate bureaucracy, and unlock funding.

It has become so clear over time that creating these international outposts is no easy task. It requires nothing less than a perfect storm of public/private funding, iconic architecture, and culture authenticity, and of course, timing and luck!

Pissarro: I’d love to hear you talk a bit about your experience working with Thomas Krens. What was his impact on you as a newly arrived curator at the Guggenheim?

Kim: I had incredible colleagues at the Guggenheim, all working towards this incredible vision that Thomas Krens was leading, but as he has often said himself, part of his success was really building an extraordinary team. I was very fortunate and lucky to have been a junior member at the time, but for many years, I shared an office with Max Hollein, now the director of the Met; Julián Zugazagoitia, who’s now the director of the Nelson-Atkins Museum; Valerie Hillings, who is now the director of the North Carolina Museum; and of course, I intersected very briefly with Michael Govan of LACMA. There were many museum directors that emerged from the Guggenheim.

So I would say, certainly, the impact that I felt was huge, but so too was the impact of many of my colleagues. It was incredibly exciting, but we were also given extraordinary opportunity and responsibility. That agency of: all right, you all seem to be very smart, talented people, here are the parameters. Here’s what we need. Now, go do it. And I think that was an incredible training ground for many of us, myself most particularly, but I would say many of my colleagues would agree. Tom Krens had a huge impact, not only on myself, but I would imagine for many others as well.

Stockman: It’s inspiring to see how you’ve carried forward Tom Krens’s visionary legacy—from being his dedicated protégé at the Guggenheim, where you helped shape several global initiatives, to now leading with your own authority.

When you left the Guggenheim, you took on an exciting new challenge at the newly created Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University (MSU) in East Lansing—where you had the privilege of collaborating with the legendary Zaha Hadid on one of her final commissions before her untimely passing. Could you give us an overview of that experience and how it shaped the next chapter of your journey? And how did that inform your approach to subsequent museum leadership roles?

Kim: Sure. I moved to East Lansing, Michigan to join the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at MSUas deputy director—East Lansing is quite different from New York. [Laughs] At the time the Broad MSU was only the second building of Zaha Hadid’s in the country. I knew Zaha through several previous projects at the Guggenheim, but it was really a thrill to envision being able to actually live in one of her buildings. And I must say, I’ve observed and even been part of several projects of hers, both realized and not. I think the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum is perhaps one of her most successful buildings. Having lived in it, I can certainly say that it’s really a thoughtful, striking museum building and presence within the campus of Michigan State University.

But part of my thinking was in this exploration of understanding the importance of place and community for a museum and vice versa and to do so in the context of a university art museum, where our audience is really the students, the faculty, the staff, and the community itself, and the exhibition programs perhaps are less reliant on the gate per se but more on experimental thought. It was a wonderful experience to be able to tap into the extraordinary cross-disciplinary expertise that exists on campus, to be able to sit down with nuclear physicists, to be able to better understand what, if any, connection can be made through art and manifest through exhibitions. In the beginning, it was very much like a startup institution. I was the first staff member hired by the founding director, Michael Rush, who sadly passed away. Within the first eighteen months, I’d hired something like twenty-five people from all around the country. It was a really informative experience.

I will say, just as a side note, when I did take that job, I was thrilled to be a part of this new museum and pleased to be able to contribute what I had learned over the years in conceiving and contemplating what a new museum might look like and what it would need, which included setting up a whole operational infrastructure beyond the architectural design and the programming.

I was still very interested in pursuing a master’s degree. Because I had given up that dream many years ago in pursuit of continued work at the Guggenheim, coming to Michigan State University, I felt that it was important to say that I was still interested in this. So after the museum had opened, and after a couple of years, to Michigan State University’s credit, they not only granted me a leave of absence, but they paid for my tuition to go to the Courtauld in London. Going back to school in your forties is perhaps not a common experience for many, but one that I would highly recommend to anyone who considers it. To go back to school after having had many years of professional experience gave me a truly new and different perspective, including this great appreciation for the luxury of time to be able to read and write and think, that I think had I gone in my twenties, I never would have fully appreciated as much as I did going in my forties.

Pissarro: At a symposium I organized on museum curatorship in the nineties, I remember a curator coming from Washington and complaining about I.M. Pei’s gorgeous East Wing of the National Gallery of Art because it doesn’t have a single right angle. Now, when I look at the Zaha Hadid museum there, let alone right angles, it doesn’t seem to have a single vertical wall from the outside. How challenging was it to work—curatorially, directorially—in such a gorgeous institution, but one that seems not to have been conceived with functional priorities as a museum space?

Stockman: Joachim, don’t forget that Min Jung worked for years in Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural masterpiece—the Guggenheim’s breathtaking spiral! What a privilege that must have been!

I also want to add that so few of Zaha’s visionary designs have been realized—making your personal experience living and working within one of her masterpieces truly extraordinary. Many have dismissed her work as impractical: stunning from the outside, but perhaps unworkable in reality.

Yet you had the rare privilege of proving them wrong from the inside out. The Broad MSU’s parametric “origami” facade wasn’t just sculptural genius—it delivered 33 percent more natural light than conventional museums, with galleries that adapt seamlessly to diverse installations, from monumental sculptures to intimate drawings. Could you share what surprised you most about how brilliantly her design served the art and visitors?

Kim: Absolutely right, from Frank Lloyd Wright to Zaha Hadid, I don’t think I’ve had many experiences working in conventional, literal white boxes, so I don’t think that was an intimidating factor. Actually, Zaha’s building works beautifully, and the sight lines in those spaces, both on a singular plane and in some of the galleries that hang and overlook these soaring spaces, are really well conceived and well executed. It’s actually not a very large building. I think on that scale, her design works beautifully.

There were a number of spaces that were intentionally conceived not simply as gallery spaces, but fostered thought as to how these more interstitial spaces might be used, blurring the lines between gallery and public space. The scale and the design was very much informed by the site itself. When Zaha was first invited to visit the campus of Michigan State University, the administration presented a couple of options with a much larger footprint, but they were farther out into the campus. There was one small possibility that I don’t think anyone thought Zaha would go for, which was the one she emphatically chose. It was right in the heart of the campus, thereby restricting and limiting the size, but symbolically for it to be right there, really on the border of the university and the community, was important to her. She created two entrances to the museum, so that it is neither facing inward nor outward, but bringing the two together. It was absolutely brilliant.

Stockman: So few of her designs have been realized, so the fact that you had this personal experience with her work is amazing. I think people have looked at a lot of her work as impractical. I mean, from the outside, they’re a vision to behold, but the fact that you actually had the experience to understand how brilliantly it was designed on the interior and how well it worked with art is very special.

Pissarro: Absolutely. So you ended up being at the Courtauld. What did you decide to work in? Were you a modernist, as I’m assuming? Who did you work with? And what did you write?

Kim: I studied under Wenny Teo. She was overseeing a rather new specialization of Chinese contemporary art, because the Courtauld was, at the time, also expanding and adding new areas of specialization. So I worked with Wenny Teo, and I have to say, I remember when I did my Zoom interview with her, and she said, “Min, right nearby you have the University of Chicago with extraordinary professors and schools. Why do you want to come to the Courtauld?” And of course, part of it was just that: I wanted to go to the Courtauld.

The Courtauld, of course, long historied and similar to the Williams College, has produced many wonderful museum directors and curators and art historians and scholars. But I also felt that, you know, I’m an immigrant to the United States, right? And while I’d been living in the United States for many years, I was interested in leaving the United States to get another perspective. To do so in London, in Europe, studying Asian and Chinese contemporary art, this sort of multi-layering of perspectives was something that was very intriguing to me. There was also the benefit of it being a highly accelerated one year program, so it allowed me to quickly return to Michigan afterwards. It was an incredible experience, one that I would highly recommend to everyone.

Stockman: Your experience and background as a curator is particularly fascinating right now amid the unprecedented wave of museum director vacancies sweeping the field. Boards are increasingly looking beyond the traditional mold—where a Ph.D. in art history was practically a prerequisite. That orthodoxy has crumbled, yet here you are: a rigorously trained curator who’s also proven to be a very successful museum director. What makes the difference?

What advice would you give to ambitious curators today who aspire to leadership roles? In your view, how does that deep curatorial foundation—honed through years of exhibition-making, collection stewardship, and scholarly rigor—actually give you an edge in the CEO-level demands of directing a major institution?

Kim: Well, I think museum directors today are required to build into their toolkit a variety of skills and expertise that may not have been traditionally asked of museum directors. Of course, having a knowledge of art history and experience of curating is hugely helpful. But I think a part of our jobs now also requires our ability to understand finances, fundraising, legal, communications, personnel matters. To develop those skills one can, of course, go and study, but also it’s really about experience. I’ve now, over thirty-five years, had the privilege of working in a variety of different museums. I started out working in a corporate museum, I’ve worked in a private museum, a university art museum, and now a civic museum, and I think each of those experiences have been incredibly informative, and they’ve also been cumulative. There’s so much that I’ve learned and gained from each of those institutions. So I suppose for anyone who might be interested in becoming a museum director or simply being in this field, I think perhaps what is important is an openness to doing a variety of things that may not be self-evident in the beginning and just collecting a set of experiences and expertise. I think that certainly benefited me and hopefully will benefit anyone who’s interested in pursuing this as a career.

Pissarro: Moving into the present day, I cannot wait to see the Anselm Kiefer exhibition at Saint Louis Art Museum. Can you tell us about that?

Kim: The exhibition, Anselm Kiefer: Becoming the Sea, just to give you a little context and background, was largely inspired by two things. One was Anselm Kiefer himself and the other was the Saint Louis Art Museum’s collection. Perhaps you know, but we have one of the most diverse collections of twentieth-century German art in the United States, and this presentation of Anselm Kiefer’s work is really a continuity of that.

I don’t know how familiar you are as to how we established this collection, but it’s interesting. We have one of the world’s largest holdings of Max Beckmann. And part of that was because, when Max Beckmann was in exile in Amsterdam, the Saint Louis Art Museum’s director at the time, Perry T. Rathbone, who later went on to become director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, invited Beckmann to come to St. Louis and procured for him a teaching position at Washington University to take over the place of Philip Guston, who was traveling in Europe at the time. So Max Beckmann came to St. Louis in 1947, and one year later, Perry Rathbone curated the first exhibition of Max Beckmann in the United States. There was a local collector at the time by the name of Morton D. May, who began to acquire many of Beckmann’s works, eventually building the largest collection of Beckmann paintings in the world. When he died in 1983, he donated and bequeathed that collection to the Saint Louis Art Museum. That same year, in addition to receiving this extraordinary collection of Max Beckmann and many German expressionists, we began to organize an exhibition called Expressions: New Art from Germany, which was an early exhibition that introduced American audiences to neo-Expressionism. It included Markus Lüpertz and Georg Baselitz and Jörg Immendorff, but also Kiefer, in 1983.

A few years later, of course, there was the big Kiefer exhibition curated by Mark Rosenthal at the Art Institute of Chicago and Philadelphia Museum of Art. And in 1987 we acquired our first Kiefer painting, Brennstäbe (Fuel Rods) (1984–87) and then later on, in 1991, Bruch der Gefäße (Breaking of the Vessels) (1990). So we’ve been very much a part of supporting and acquiring Kiefer’s work, just as we have done with Gerhard Richter and many artists that continue the thread from modern into contemporary. In many ways this Anselm Kiefer exhibition is a continuum of that.

But aside from Mark Rosenthal’s Kiefer exhibition in the eighties and Michael Auping’s big Kiefer exhibition, Heaven and Earth, in 2005 at the Modern Art Museum Fort Worth, there have been some smaller shows, but no major survey-like shows in the US in twenty years. And of course, over two decades, the evolution of his work has just been so extraordinary. We felt that this was the right moment, and the Saint Louis Art Museum was the right place to do this exhibition. When the artist came to St. Louis in 1991 to install Breaking of the Vessels after we acquired it, Michael Shapiro, who was chief curator at the Saint Louis Art Museum at the time, arranged for him to take a boat ride along the Mississippi River and the confluence.

And recalling those memories, Kiefer created new paintings specifically for our sculpture hall. Each of these paintings rise about 31 by 28 feet. Two are of the Rhine River, and two of the Mississippi River, recalling his memory and experience of that 1991 trip. The works are figurative, which for many in the United States may seem like a new development. The representation of self and figuration, however, has always been present throughout Anselm’s career. The exhibition title, Becoming the Sea, comes from the American poet Gregory Corso’s poem and epitaph that references a river “unafraid of becoming the sea.” It imagines this transformation less as a finality and an end, but rather as part of a continuation and cycle of time and nature and a recurrence in life and beyond. So all of that, in many ways, will be addressed in the exhibition.

Stockman: Can you tell us more about the Saint Louis Art Museum itself? What elevates it beyond its stunning Beaux-Arts perch in Forest Park to a true powerhouse among American institutions, drawing half a million visitors annually? How has its evolution—from encyclopedic treasures like ancient Sumerian gold and Claude Monet’s luminous landscapes to vibrant Native American and African American holdings—shaped its role as St. Louis’s cultural heartbeat?

Kim: The history of the museum is interesting. It started out initially as the Saint Louis School and Museum of Fine Arts and was founded in 1879 as part of an entity under the umbrella of Washington University. It was initially located downtown, but we moved to our current location in Forest Park, which, by the way, is this wonderful urban oasis that’s five hundred acres larger than Central Park in New York.

We came to be in this building, which was originally built for the 1904 World’s Fair, also known as the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, celebrating the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase. Many of the buildings during the World’s Fair were designed to be temporary, with the exception of a few, including our building, which was originally known as the Palace of Fine Arts. It was meant to be permanent to house the new museum, and our building was designed by Cass Gilbert, who, of course, went on to create the Woolworth Building in New York and the United States Supreme Court Building in Washington, DC.

When we moved to this building, we separated from the university, became a city museum, and started to receive municipal tax support. During that seven month period, the World’s Fair received more than nineteen million visitors. It’s kind of remarkable to think about that today, and it was at that time that it was determined that the museum would no longer charge admissions. That was then incorporated into our mandate and literally carved in stone over the north facade of our building, where it says, “Dedicated to Art and Free to All.” So we have actually been free for over 122 years, which is quite rare. Outside of the Smithsonian, I don’t know many American museums that have been free for that long.

The museum thrived for several decades, but then as you got into the 1970s, you saw across America many cities beginning to struggle, and St. Louis was no exception. Many residents who were in the city started moving towards the suburbs, and the city found it very difficult to continue to solely financially support the art museum. So, in the early 1970s, civic leaders proposed something quite remarkable and unique and visionary: they proposed to establish a regional, multi-jurisdictional tax district that, through property tax revenue, would support the art museum, the zoo, and eventually three other institutions. To this day, the museum, through this property tax revenue within this taxing district called the Zoological Park & Museum District (ZMD), the Saint Louis Art Museum receives about sixty percent of our annual operating support. I think that truly informs not only the governance structure but really is a constant reminder of who we are and who we serve. So that becomes very much our North Star in thinking about not only the continued development of our collection, but the kinds of exhibitions and programs that we want to offer to our community, because, essentially, they are our biggest donors of the museum.

Stockman: New York—as with similar global hubs—has over a hundred cultural institutions, all competing for the same funds. It seems that institutions like the Saint Louis Art Museum may actually have a fundraising advantage: their local communities care deeply about preserving their museums, zoos, and cultural anchors as essential civic identity.

I remember you mentioning in an interview that even during the pandemic, your fundraising increased—a testament to that unbreakable local bond. While so many peer institutions shuttered or slashed programs, supporters stepped up precisely to ensure their museum stayed open and vital. What created that resilience? Was it the free-admission model, the “people’s palace” ethos etched into its World’s Fair DNA, or something uniquely St. Louis about how the city rallies around its cultural crown jewels?

Pissarro: That’s amazing.

Kim: It is. I think part of it was that, again, we received this incredible support from the public through tax revenue, which made some of the challenges a little less painful for us. For many museums that had an understandable reliance on earned revenue, during the pandemic, when they were shut down, to not be able to count on that source of revenue was really devastating. For us, it allowed us to continue to provide programming virtually first and then eventually on-site, and the generosity that we received from our community, whether it was by continuing their membership, even if we were closed, or through financial contributions, was really heartfelt and transformative. I think a lot of it was based on a certain level of civic pride. This museum, which has been supported by St. Louisans for over a century and in doing so, has been able to provide free admission, has people who have been part of the museum for multiple generations. And that's really quite unique. That level of both pride and support is perhaps one that I think makes us not only a great American art museum or art museum in America, but perhaps one of the more egalitarian ones as well.

I’ve never experienced in any other museum this extraordinary circumstance that the Saint Louis Art Museum has with this level of sustained financial support coming from the community itself. Because this tax district supports five incredible institutions—the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Saint Louis Science Center, the Missouri History Museum, the Missouri Botanical Garden, and the Saint Louis Zoo—it also embodies what can be done through the excellence of regional cooperation. Hopefully it can also be a model for others to consider.