Christine Y. Kim

Kim, a Korean American, was born in Newport Beach and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area.[3] She attended Connecticut College, where she became good friends with future fashion designer Peter Som.[4]

She moved to New York in 1993. For a time, she played bass guitar in a punk band.[4]

Kim's first museum job after graduate school was in the bookstore at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1999. She was quickly hired as a writer in the Education Department, contributing research and texts on artists and works of art in the permanent collection for The American Century where she met other aspiring young curators and writers focusing on works of art by artists of color such as Franklin Sirmans and Lisa Dent.

In 2000, following the appointments of Lowery Stokes Sims and Thelma Golden as Director and deputy director for Exhibitions and Programs, respectively, at the Studio Museum in Harlem, Kim was hired as a curatorial assistant and later promoted to assistant curator and associate curator. Kim organized the exhibition Freestyle (2000)[5] popularizing the term "post-black art"[2] and featuring work by artists such as Mark Bradford, Jennie C. Jones, Dave McKenzie, and Julie Mehretu. In 2003, she organized Black Belt, an exhibition that featured works by Black and, for the first time in the museum's history, Asian American artists such as Sanford Biggers, Patty Chang, Ellen Gallagher, David Hammons, Arthur Jafa, and Glenn Kaino, and their musing on cross cultural connections and hybridities growing out of 1970s popular culture.[6] Art reviewer Roberta Smith praised the show for its recognition of "the increasingly blurred lines of racial difference" but also criticized the show as "simplistic" and mired in "artistic academicism and literal-mindedness".[6] In 2007, Kim organized Henry Taylor: Sis and Bra,[7] the artist's first solo museum exhibition.

Later, Kim presented exhibitions such as Kehinde Wiley: World Stage Lagos - Dakar (2008)[8] and Flow (2008),[9] referred to as the "African 'F' show" featuring work by artists from Africa such as Latifa Echakhch, Nicholas Hlobo, Otobong Nkanga, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye at the Studio Museum. She also co-founded the Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND) a non-profit committed to temporary, site-specific public art exhibitions with curator Shamim M. Momin.[3]

In late 2009, Kim was hired as Associate Curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA),[3][10] where she became "a force within the city art scene".[2] Her exhibitions included James Turell: A Retrospective (2013–14),[11] co-curated with Govan, which won first place for the Best Monographic Museum Exhibition in the U.S. by the International Art Critics Association (AICA-USA), and was presented concurrent with major solo presentations of Turrell's work at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (MFAH); Human Nature: Contemporary Art from the Collection (2011),[12] co-curated with Franklin Sirmans; Isaac Julien: Playtime (2019)[13] that marked the artist's first major presentation in Los Angeles; and Julie Mehretu (2019-2021),[14] a mid-career survey curated with Rujeko Hockley, which traveled to the High Museum of Art, Atlanta and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.[2] In 2019, Kim was promoted to full curator at LACMA.

In 2021, Kim was hired as a curator-at-large for the Tate museum network.[2]

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