Tate Modern’s Clara Kim Heads to LA MoCA as Chief Curator
Clara Kim is leaving London’s Tate Trendy, the place she has served as senior curator of worldwide artwork since 2016, to grow to be chief curator of the Museum of Up to date Artwork, Los Angeles (LA MoCA). Kim, who will assume her new function September 1, was instrumental in broadening Tate’s everlasting assortment to incorporate works addressing postcolonial and transnational artwork histories. Among the many exhibitions she organized on the British establishment are a extensively praised 2020 exhibition of the work of Steve McQueen, and Kara Walker’s acclaimed 2019 Turbine Corridor fee, Fons Americanus, a forty-three-foot excessive fountain bearing allegorical figures and scenes that has since been destroyed.
“All through my profession, I’ve championed artwork via exhibitions, residencies, and commissions, pushed by the basic perception in the potential of cultural dialogue and trade to rework people and communities,” Kim mentioned. “As a various, multi-lingual, multi-ethnic metropolis, Los Angeles is uniquely positioned to chart new paths and horizons for modern artwork and what museums ought to seem like within the twenty-first century.”
Earlier than coming to Tate, Kim, whose arrival at LA MoCA marks a return to her hometown, served a senior curator of visible arts on the Walker Artwork Middle, Minneapolis, and as gallery director and curator at REDCAT, Los Angeles. Whereas at Tate, she cocurated the 2018 Gwangju Biennale and the 2017 exhibition “Condemned to be Trendy,” the latter part of the Getty Basis’s Pacific Normal Time initiative.
Kim fills a place that has been vacant since 2018, when then director Philippe Vergne controversially dismissed chief curator Helen Molesworth. Vergne himself resigned shortly thereafter, with Klaus Biesenbach entering into the function of director. Biesenbach in 2019 employed Mia Locks as senior curator and director of latest initiatives. Locks lasted lower than two years within the place, chalking up her spring 2021 departure to an incapacity on the a part of the museum’s management to embrace inclusion, range, fairness, and entry. Months later, Biesenbach was bumped from director to creative director, with Johanna Burton arriving from the Wexner Middle for the Arts at The Ohio State College in Columbus as govt director. Biesenbach summarily stop, returning to his native Germany to helm Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie and the yet-to-open Museum of the twentieth Century in the identical metropolis. Kim is Burton’s first main rent since her September 2021 arrival at LA MoCA.
