Judy Kim joined the Brooklyn Museum in early 2007 and is Curator of Exhibitions, Head of the Exhibitions Division, which oversees all permanent collection–based shows and special exhibitions. She is coordinating curator of Gilbert & George, on view from October 3, 2008 to January 11, 2009, as well as The Black List Project: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders and Elvis Mitchell, November 21, 2008–March 29, 2009. Previously she was Curator of Exhibitions at the American Federation of Arts from 2001 to 2007, where she managed all curatorial and administrative activities. From 1999 to 2001, Ms. Kim was the Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. Prior to that she was at the Philadelphia Museum of Art where she organized The Spirit of Korea and founded the Korean Heritage Group. She was a member of the adjunct faculty, Department of Arts, University of Hartford, and has been a panelist and lecturer. She received a B.A. in Art History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an M.A. from the Center for Curatorial Studies and Art in Contemporary Culture at Bard College.
Mother and Father Worked Hard So I Can Play is a work that was made specifically for our period rooms. Last spring when Yinka Shonibare was in New York, he visited the Brooklyn Museum to meet with the relevant staff and also to take a look at the Blum and 4th floor Schapiro galleries, where his survey Yinka Shonibare MBE would be installed. While he was here, we gave him a tour of our period rooms, and he was immediately enchanted by them. Before the day was over, it was decided that he would create a site-specific work for a number of those rooms. Once he was back in London, we emailed him the floor plans for the period rooms along with documents about the history of each of the rooms. Yinka seemed taken not only with the way the rooms look—the furnishings, the maze-like layout of the houses, etc—but also with the historical context of the rooms.
Months later, we started to receive “work in progress” shots of the children-size mannequins. First the preliminary sketches, then the sculpted clay bodies of the mannequins, and finally a picture of the girl with jump rope. Then the mannequins were packed and crated in Yinka’s studio and sent by ship to arrive here in time for the installation. Even though they were produced in London and there were no opportunities to try them out in the respective rooms before their arrival, they all fit perfectly in their new temporary homes.
As Yinka has said about the placement of the children, “It’s like the children’s game, ‘Where’s Waldo?’” There are no individual labels pointing out the specific locations of the children; the idea is for our visitors to wander through the rooms and stumble upon them. Hopefully those who usually come to the Brooklyn Museum to see contemporary works will discover our wonderful period rooms through Mother and Father Worked Hard So I Can Play. And, those who are already familiar with the period rooms will rediscover these rooms and see them in a different way.
People have been asking how I learned of Sun K. Kwak. I first noticed Sun’s work well over a year ago through the gallery that represents her. I obtained basic information about Sun and looked at installation shots of her previous projects at the Queens Museum of Art, NY; Gallery Skape, Seoul, Korea; Samsung Life Building, Seoul, Korea; The Drawing Center, NY; Haus Der Kulturen der Welt Museum, Berlin, Germany; etc. A few months later, when Sun was in a group show in a gallery in Chelsea, I went and looked at her work in person. It was a small piece compared to some of her previous works, but it still gave me a good sense of the texture and method of her work.
This past winter, when we were looking to schedule an exhibition on very short notice for the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Gallery on the 5th floor (the “Rotunda”), I remembered Sun’s work. I got in touch with her through her gallery, asked her to come to the Museum to walk through the Rotunda with me and to see if she thought she might be able to work with the space. I then asked her for a tentative proposal and did a studio visit with her to talk about her ideas more in-depth.
Then we followed the usual procedures—presenting the idea to the Exhibitions Division, then recommending and presenting the idea to the director—before we added it to our exhibitions calendar. Because we had very little lead-time for this show, everything had to move quickly. Thanks to Sun, her assistants, and staff from all departments of the Museum, we were able to pull together Enfolding 280 Hours in just two months.
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