photograph by lucy garrett
New director Zoe Kahr stands at the original entrance to the museum, when it was called Brooks Memorial Art Gallery and so small it was known as the “the jewel box in the park.”
Starting November 1st, Zoe Kahr will take over as the next executive director of the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, following Emily Ballew Neff’s departure in June 2021. Kahr, who holds a bachelor’s degree and M.B.A. from Yale University and a Ph.D. in art history from University College London, brings with her 12 years of experience at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), most recently serving as deputy director for curatorial and planning.
Until a member of the curatorial team at the Brooks reached out to her about a project that LACMA had organized, Kahr admits she didn’t know much about the museum — or Memphis, for that matter. After some research, she tells me over the phone, “I was amazed, really, at how thoughtful the Brooks team has been about reaching out to and serving different Memphis communities over time, focusing on making each community feel welcome and included in the conversation.”
In short, she says, “I think the Brooks is really ahead of many of its museum peers in seeking to serve a wide array of communities through programming.”
Once she came to Memphis for her interview, she found herself drawn to the city even further. “Coming from Los Angeles, people here were just so friendly and welcoming,” she says. And while packing up to move across the country with her husband, Daniel Shin, and kids (ages 5 and 8) in tow has been a daunting task, she bubbles with excitement as she speaks to me from her LA home about her plans to immerse her family into the Memphis culture, so different from the places she’s lived before.
But, having lived on the West Coast and in the Northeast, moving from city to city, from region to region, isn’t out of Kahr’s comfort zone, as long as an art museum is nearby. After all, art museums have served as touchstones for the memories that drive her passion for the arts.
“My grandmother was an art historian — that’s how I got interested in museums. She was an expert in seventeenth-century Dutch and Venetian painting. A lot of my childhood memories revolve around being with her in museums. She taught my parents to love museums, so it was something we did together as a family.”
No matter the location, whether Downtown or Overton Park, Kahr sees the museum as the city’s living room. “It’s such a lovely way of thinking about what the city’s art museum can be and all the different ways you can be drawn to visit. I just think that’s a really nice ambition for Memphis’ art museum — to be a space where people feel comfortable and engage in a wide array of activities. Your living room is a place where you do a bunch of different things — you might read a book, you might socialize with your friends, you might watch a movie, you might eat an embarrassing amount of ice cream alone.”
Perhaps because of this familial connection, Kahr’s role as an art historian and curator taps into more than her scholarly interests; it is a way for her to connect with her family, her colleagues, and her community. This “human component of my work,” she says, is where “something magical happens.”
“I’ve always been interested in working in an encyclopedic museum, meaning we collect and show things from around the world and many different historical periods,” she says. And though she studied eighteenth-century French and American art extensively for her Ph.D. thesis, “there are too many things that I love. Mostly, I love being surrounded by brilliant curators and museum experts who know more than I will ever know about any one topic and who will teach me new things every day.”
This way of thinking is not unusual as museums like the Brooks seek to broaden the definition of expertise. “In the early days [of museums],” Kahr says, “there was only one expert and it was the curator. Now when we consider a work of art, we think about how there might be many points of view from which you could access it. … And the community is often an important source of expertise.”
To Kahr, including and serving the community is fundamental to a museum’s purpose. “I think of museums as civic assets,” she says, adding that historically, museums were exclusive establishments, belonging to royal and aristocratic families and serving the upper class. They were places of preservation, not only of the objects within them but also of the status quo.
Today, though, Kahr says, “The field as a whole has shifted to be driven much less by academic interests and much more about audience and accessibility,” that magical human component.
While at LACMA, in addition to producing more than 300 exhibitions, Kahr worked extensively to fold the museum into the fabric of the city, while dispelling previous notions of exclusivity and formality and encouraging continued engagement. Out of this mission came her idea for Local Access, a program that partnered with smaller museums throughout Los Angeles County and the surrounding areas to bring exhibition programming tailored to the audiences in those specific locations.
“For big museums, the portion of the collection they show is teeny tiny,” Kahr says. “LACMA is in the single-digit percentages. Even the Brooks has a collection of more than 10,000 objects, but less than 1,000 are on public view. So how do we get all these objects out of storage? The Local Access exhibitions consisted entirely of LACMA objects, but they were visited by people from Los Angeles County who would never have come to see them at LACMA due to traffic, distance, or lack of leisure time. We wanted to serve audiences within LA County for whom LACMA was never going to be accessible.”
photograph by lucy garrett
In addition to local partnerships, Kahr developed new museum partnerships in Asia, Latin America, Australia, and the Middle East.
Overall, under the leadership of Kahr, the curatorial team renewed its focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion, within the exhibition space. “In a major city museum, you have the opportunity to be the place where people come to learn about other cultures,” she says. “There’s definitely a long history of that at the Brooks. And that’s something that I would love to continue. The Brooks is a place where people can discover new cultures and also see their own culture represented, because that is equally important.”
But this need for diversity, equity, and inclusion should extend past the exhibitions themselves, which, at times, can last for only a handful of months. Kahr explains, “Each museum has its own ecosystem, but we’re all participating in a global and national dialogue around who works in a museum and what the consequences of that are in terms of what the museum chooses to record in its collections, which artists the museum highlights, and what stories the museum tells.”
To ensure a lasting legacy of diversity, equity, and inclusion at LACMA, Kahr spearheaded efforts to recruit diverse staff into the museum and support them in their career pathways. “We found that many staff would come in at an entry level and would get stuck because they needed additional training or education to get promoted,” she says. So the museum partnered with Arizona State University to provide a free master’s program in art history for LACMA staff, who could remain employed at the museum while getting their education.
“Building career pathways into museums is some of the most satisfying work I’ve done,” Kahr says. “I’m really interested in continuing that conversation at the Brooks.” In general, she hopes her insights from working at LACMA will add to the Brooks’ ongoing efforts towards diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility. “Of course, they will all be put through a Memphis and a Brooks filter. Life is about the specificity of location and culture.”
Though she is excited to learn Memphis’ specific needs and tastes, noting her curiosity as a strength for leadership, Kahr already acknowledges the legacy of Memphis artists and Memphis’ vibrant creative community. “As the city museum, we get to play a leading role in recording the story of our region’s artistic production,” she says.
But Kahr also recognizes that this vibrant community suffered a loss with the closure of Memphis College of Art, with its traditions of educating artists, being a creative hub, and providing artistic programming for the community. She hopes to find a way to fill that gap.
“One thing we’ve done really well in Los Angeles is to develop the idea of the museum as a porous space,” she says, explaining that museums can be a part of the living culture, not a stagnant collection of works but a place in service of the present and the future, not just the past.
“I’ve been thinking about how we blur the edges of the museums,” she says. “We can use that porosity to help people who might remember a negative experience in the past — something they read, or a feeling they had when they went to a museum. We want to help them feel a little more curious and a little more invited into the museum space.”
With the Brooks’ move Downtown in a few years, this living culture within the museum, Kahr explains, could take form in partnerships with Tom Lee Park or the National Civil Rights Museum, ways to connect the museum with a different energy. The new location on the river bluffs is “a much denser community,” she says, “and public spaces become more important in dense areas.”
But, no matter the location, whether Downtown or Overton Park, Kahr sees the museum as the city’s living room. “It’s such a lovely way of thinking about what the city’s art museum can be and all the different ways you can be drawn to visit. I just think that’s a really nice ambition for Memphis’ art museum — to be a space where people feel comfortable and engage in a wide array of activities. Your living room is a place where you do a bunch of different things — you might read a book, you might socialize with your friends, you might watch a movie, you might eat an embarrassing amount of ice cream alone.
“And if it’s the city’s living room,” she continues, “it’s not one person’s living room. It’s a space where you can have a personal experience, but it’s a public space where you also come into contact with your fellow citizens. The city’s living room is where we can build a strong and resilient community.”
Most importantly, a living room is a place you return to day after day, a place where memories are formed and shared from youth into old age. It’s timeless and priceless, much like the memories Kahr formed with her grandma all those years ago, wandering the museum halls and staring at the masterpieces — the memories that keep her going back time and again.
