{"id":106516,"date":"2026-10-15T12:48:34","date_gmt":"2026-10-15T19:48:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=106516"},"modified":"2026-10-20T14:25:39","modified_gmt":"2026-10-20T21:25:39","slug":"finding-her-place-becky-bloom-takes-the-helm-at-suma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/finding-her-place-becky-bloom-takes-the-helm-at-suma\/","title":{"rendered":"Finding Her Place: Becky Bloom Takes the Helm at SUMA"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Becky Bloom doing field work in a stupa.<\/p><\/div>\n

By the time Becky Bloom<\/a> landed in Utah, she had already worked at New York\u2019s Rubin Museum of Art, studied at Yale and Michigan State, and spent summers conducting research in the western Himalayas. Museums were the career she had been building toward for years. She had no idea there was one in Cedar City.<\/p>\n

Now she\u2019s leading it.<\/p>\n

Bloom was finishing up a one-year fellowship at the Smithsonian\u2019s National Museum of Asian Art, working on a Buddhist art exhibition, when her husband moved to southern Utah to guide in Zion. Bloom decided \u201cUtah is a much nicer place to write my dissertation than Michigan in the winter.\u201d COVID hit, she stayed. The couple had a child. Then she met Jessica Kinsey, the director of the Southern Utah Museum of Art. \u201cI was like \u2018Wait, there\u2019s a museum here?\u2019 And a position kind of fell in my lap. Jessica had found the money to hire a curator and I just happened to be down the road.\u201d After several years as curator and a year as interim director, Bloom is now its executive director.<\/p>\n

\u201cI always knew that my career path would be in museums,\u201d she says. \u201cBut I was never one who wanted to work at The Met; I\u2019ve always wanted to balance lifestyle and cost of living and that kind of thing. And an academic museum is a good bridge for me, from academia to museums.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Southern Utah Museum of Art is ten years old this year, but what Bloom discovered after arriving in Cedar City is that the connection between art and the wider community did not begin with SUMA\u2019s opening. It is tied to a much longer history of support for the arts in southern Utah. In 1929, Mary Bastow founded the art department at what was then called Branch Normal School, now Southern Utah University. \u201cWhat a bad ass, right? In a tiny sheepherding community,\u201d Bloom says. \u201cNow it\u2019s this big art department focused on filmmaking, art, and design\u2026I think a lot about carrying that torch,\u201d Bloom says. \u201cI don\u2019t take that responsibility for granted, building trust with our local community and the campus.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The Southern Utah Museum of Art on the campus of Southern Utah University in Cedar City celebrated its 10-year anniversary this summer.<\/p><\/div>\n

That history became particularly vivid when Bloom began researching a Maynard Dixon painting in SUMA\u2019s collection. \u201cBefore coming here, I didn\u2019t even know who Maynard Dixon was. I found that Cedar City had an annual art exhibit starting in 1940 that was funded by New Deal community arts funding through the WPA. That is how the museum ended up with regionally well-known artists who were invited to sell their work in the show. Art for All was the title of the exhibit. It was all about bringing art to everyday folks in rural Utah.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jessica Kinsey, SUMA\u2019s first director, left in the summer 2025 to join the University of Oklahoma faculty, and Bloom was named interim director beginning August 1. Then Bloom won the permanent position following a national search and became executive director effective July 1, 2026. Her new role draws on a career spent thinking not only about what museums show, but how and why they show it, who gets to tell the stories behind the objects and what relationship a museum should have with the communities it serves.<\/p>\n

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Photo by Russell Gearhart for Southern Utah Museum of Art (@gearhartphoto) – Becky Bloom, director of curatorial affairs, speaks at the opening reception for “Salt Lines: Exploring Climate, Environment, and the Saline Influx”, a fall 2024 exhibit at the Southern Utah Museum of Art on October 18, 2024.<\/p><\/div>\n

Art has been a part of her life since childhood in New Jersey. Her mother took her into New York City and introduced her to museums. \u201cWe always visited museums. We\u2019d be in Barbados and my mom would find a historic home to tour. So, art, and museums in particular, were always a central part of my life.\u201d When she went to Middlebury College in Vermont she planned on studying anthropology in India, but a trip to Thailand sparked a passion for Southeast Asian studies.<\/p>\n

A religious studies class was also pivotal. \u201cI took a religious studies class that changed my life. I ended up majoring in art history and religion because they\u2019re obviously inextricably connected whether you\u2019re talking about European traditions or Buddhist traditions. I also realized my interest in anthropology was its focus on how to understand humans. Religion is the lens that is the most revealing of that and the most interesting to me.\u201d She wrote an undergraduate thesis on a Himalayan goddess and her representation in the Kathmandu Valley of Nepal.<\/p>\n

After graduating from Middlebury, Bloom began an internship at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City, where she worked for two years and ended up as an assistant curator. There she received professional training in managing and interpreting collections while also getting a front-row seat to the growing discussions around decolonization in museums and universities. With a new perspective on collecting and showing the work of non-Western cultures, she decided graduate school would be her next step.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy [then] boyfriend was like, \u2018Why are you leaving the job you\u2019re going to be trying to get when you get out of graduate school?\u2019 and I was like, \u2018valid point.\u2019 But I wanted to be able to do well what I saw these other scholars and curators that I was working with do\u2014develop exciting and new exhibitions.\u201d<\/p>\n

She earned a master\u2019s in Asian religions at Yale\u2019s Divinity School, then forged on to PhD work at Michigan State University. \u201cI also did a museum studies certificate at Michigan, which was awesome because it was interdepartmental so there were students from across different departments. They are the NAGPRA [Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act] HQ for the upper Midwest so I learned a lot about Native American collections, about the history of collecting, about working with collections from an era when archaeology was \u2018finders keepers.\u2019 There was a lot of focus on decolonization practices which has made me more aware of that within my area of study\u2014specifically Tibetan Himalayan.\u201d<\/p>\n

Graduate school also satisfied her passion for onsite and in-person research. \u201cDuring the idyllic years of graduate study,\u201d she says wistfully, \u201cI spent every summer in the western Himalayas doing research, visiting so many temples, and I worked at a monastic museum teaching best practices to monks who have a collection, the way churches have collections of objects, about display, about security, about exhibition strategies using a model from sustainable exhibition development including hands-on methods, stakeholder involvement, and indigenous knowledge.\u201d<\/p>\n

Decolonization and repatriation in the area of collecting are two important lessons she carried from that work. \u201cAll of that led me to be thinking through how to resolve the fraught history of collecting. It\u2019s been a passionate side project for me. Maybe that\u2019s why it took me 10 years to get through graduate school. Well, there was COVID, but also, I have all these side quests.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Tooveep (The Land) is at the Southern Utah Museum of Art<\/a> through March 6, 2027.<\/p><\/div>\n

At SUMA, those \u201cside quests\u201d have converged. One of the last things Bloom had done at the Rubin Museum was an exhibition of contemporary Tibetan art, an experience she finds herself thinking about in her work with contemporary artists in Utah. \u201cI think about that a lot in connection to what I\u2019m doing now. I get to work with some exceptional artists who are really stoked to talk to students and community members.\u201d
\nShe has been trying to engage more with contemporary artists, both for what they bring to the museum and for what they can offer students. \u201cIt is really exciting to work with living artists and I think it\u2019s good to show the students that there are working artists and what they\u2019re doing. It\u2019s also a model of how contemporary artists are addressing history in terms of traditional mediums. For example, the artists in our [new] show Tooveep (The Land)<\/em> and how these artists are reinterpreting traditional methods into their own work that tells stories about identity, displacement, resilience, in relation to things like the land. Also, what does it look like in Utah? Topics that feel relevant and urgent like the Great Salt Lake.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her interests go beyond Cedar City. \u201cWe\u2019re trying to build more partnerships and build cross-promotional events with other Utah museums. We are always looking for ways to bolster each other. We also collaborate with other academic museums like the University of New Mexico and the Tang Museum in upstate New York. We\u2019re co-organizing a fall 2028 environmental show with them. We have a connection with the University of Denver now too. We\u2019re exploring ideas like cost sharing and traveling some shows. It\u2019s about building on a network to support each other to make our dreams more feasible.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI love the collaborative nature of museum work,\u201d she says. \u201cMy work is always better with other people\u2019s input. I\u2019m learning how to step into the leadership role, but I also crave other people\u2019s input. \u2026 Especially when we\u2019re talking about de-colonization issues where we let the community drive the work. I have learned from community leaders how to build longer-term, reciprocal relationships.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bloom may not have known there was an art museum in Cedar City when she arrived, but in SUMA she seems to have found the kind of museum she had been preparing for all along: one where scholarship and contemporary art intersect, where the university meets the wider community, and where the work of the museum is as much about relationships as objects. \u201cMuseums encourage people to step outside their own world view, their own experience,\u201d she says. \u201cAt an academic museum, the mandate is being a mirror of our campus toward our campus and then outward toward our surrounding community.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Photo by Russell Gearhart \/ @gearhartphoto – Fall 2025 exhibitions at the Southern Utah Museum of Art on Oct. 17, 2025.<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By the time Becky Bloom landed in Utah, she had already worked at New York\u2019s Rubin Museum of Art, studied at Yale and Michigan State, and spent summers conducting research in the western Himalayas. Museums were the career she had been building toward for years. She had no […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1736,"featured_media":106529,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[20,14],"tags":[4985,3728],"class_list":["post-106516","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-art_professional_spotlight","category-visual_arts","tag-becky-bloom","tag-suma"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-10-27 15:59:02","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/Becky_Fieldwork-in-a-Stupa_Ladakh2014-1-1-scaled-e1792527289445.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106516","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1736"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=106516"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106516\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":106533,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106516\/revisions\/106533"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/106529"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=106516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=106516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=106516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}