Miri Kim, Curator of American Art at Brigham Young University Museum of Art

Miri Kim recognizes the influence of Seventeen magazine in her art history trajectory. It was in the pages of the teen magazine that the BYU Museum of Art curator first heard of Rice University, which she left Utah for as a college freshman. At a preview week in Houston, she wandered into a dark lecture hall. She still remembers the clicking sound of the slide projectors. On the screen were two images by early 20th-century Dutch painter Piet Mondrian—one a naturalist rendering of a chrysanthemum; the other his famous “Broadway Boogie Woogie.” Her immediate reaction was, “How do you go from a chrysanthemum to “Broadway Boogie Woogie”? And that stuck with me.” She soon found a passion for answering such questions.

While she was a student at Rice, Kim went beyond campus to explore the exceptional museum scene in Houston. Just down the road was The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston where she secured a rare paid summer curatorial internship. She studied under Dr. Emily Ballew Neff and Dr. Kaylin Weber, who posed a set of questions to her to investigate, including “finding out how many cattle ranches there were in the U.S. at the time.” They also asked her to research the exact location of an Ansel Adams photograph, “Surf Sequence, San Mateo County Coast, California.” In the process of this research, she sent dozens of emails and managed to track down one of Adams’ photo assistants who remembered that it was taken around Pescadero, California. The discovery gave her the confidence that she could tackle even the most challenging questions.

Exploring the museum “was an education unto itself,” she says. It taught her that “research doesn’t only happen in universities.” She wandered further from campus to explore the Menil Collection, a renowned collection of modern and contemporary art housed in architect Renzo Piano’s exquisitely designed building that embraces diffused natural light. “I found that studying works of art in person was a real gift, and a real privilege that kind of boggles me now. I was looking at Magrittes when I was 20, just while I was on a lunch break.”

Her curiosity aided her greatly in her intern tasks and built confidence in her skills at finding elusive facts. “From there I probably could have become a private investigator,” she jokes. But she was more interested in finding out how she could get paid to research art.

When she returned to Utah after graduating from Rice, Kim began working in Visitor Services at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts. Here she honed her customer service skills that would unknowingly help her in her current role as a curator. “I realize, looking back now, that my customer service jobs really prepared me for this role (as a curator). They didn’t tell us about this part of the job during my internship at the MFA, Houston, but the visitor services work taught me just as much.” She realized, though, that if she wanted to be a curator, she really needed to get a PhD.

Kim lectures on the art of Mimi Chen Ting.

“I got into Princeton’s art history PhD program and traded the mountains of Utah for the turnpikes of New Jersey,” she says. (Now, whenever she misses Jersey, she watches an episode of The Sopranos.) Along with a masters in art history, she earned a masters in Latin “because, you know, Princeton gotta Princeton.” Her studies continue as she rounds out her PhD program with her current work on her dissertation on American painter Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847-1917).

Since accepting her position as Curator of American Art at the BYU Museum of Art in 2023, Kim has collaborated with fellow curator Isaac King on the re-envisioned American Art gallery, Crossing the Divide, as well as Mimi Chen Ting: Make Movement Visible, where she worked alongside the artist’s family and found a personal connection. “My parents came here on the same type of student visa (as Ting),” she points out.

Up next for Kim is a lot more of what she loves best—art history sleuthing. “I’m currently developing exhibitions on: outer space; mountains; Patrick Nagatani and the atomic histories of the American Southwest and Intermountain West; Fritz Scholder’s art exhibition at and visit to BYU in 1974; and the dockworker strike of 1934 (the MOA has several paintings by Maynard Dixon from that important year in U.S. labor history).” And advocacy. “I’m an advocate,” she says, when people ask if she too is an artist. “Wouldn’t every artist want one? And that’s how I see my role, as an advocate for art and artists.”

Kim takes a patron through BYU Museum of Art’s The Sense of Beauty in 2025.

Gina Cavallo

Gina Cavallo has been a curator, registrar, and executive director in museums for over 35 years. She spent many years as an art critic for publications in Phoenix. She began her career at the Phoenix Art Museum and the Heard Museum, was a founding curator at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, spent two terms managing exhibitions at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and was the Executive Director at the Mission Inn Foundation & Museum in Riverside, California. Her current role is Director of Development for Taproot Theatre Company in Seattle where she also serves as the curator of the Kendall Center Exhibition Series. She moved to Orem in 2024 with her husband, a theatre faculty member at UVU.