Kim Min-gyeong and Lee Hae-won, awardees of the KF Global Museum Internship, have been assigned to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

The Korea Foundation has dispatched two junior curators, Kim Min-gyeong and Lee Hae-won, to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York for five-month assignments under its Global Museum Internship program. They are both master’s degree holders in art history ― Kim from Ewha Womans University and Lee from Sookmyung Women’s University. They were selected through a three-round evaluation process including application review, in-depth interview and skill assessment.

The KF Global Museum Internship, introduced in 2011, is designed to provide an opportunity for young Korean curatorial experts to acquire real-life experience at leading museums abroad. The interns are expected to contribute to raising awareness of Korean art and culture and meet the needs for technical expertise at overseas museums, which often lack specialists in Korean art. Under this program two junior-level curators completed internships at the Museum of Fine Art in Boston and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York during the latter half of last year.

During their stay at Guggenheim, Kim will be assigned to the Asian Art Department and Lee will conduct her internship in gathering and compiling data and their digitization. Lee said that data archiving is one of the areas where Korean museums lag behind. She expressed her hope to learn from Guggenheim’s advanced system and thereby contribute to the development of museums back home.

The Guggenheim Museum, renowned for its expansive collection of modern and contemporary art, was established in 1937 by Solomon R. Guggenheim, a U.S. steel mogul and philanthropist. In June 2011, the museum staged “Lee Ufan: Marking Infinity,” a large-scale retrospective of Korean avant-garde artist Lee Ufan (Yi U-hwan), with sponsorship support from the Foundation. The three-month exhibition, featuring Lee’s drawings, paintings and sculptural works, attracted some 300,000 visitors. In 2000, the museum held a comprehensive retrospective of multimedia artist Nam June Paik.

The Guggenheim Museum building is an architectural masterpiece of Frank Lloyd Wright and, thanks largely to its distinctive spiral design, has been a major landmark of New York since its completion in 1959. Housing mostly non-figurative and abstract artworks from the 20th century, the museum boasts the world’s largest Kandinsky collection of 180 pieces. It has been actively engaged in the promotion of contemporary art through the presentation of fellowships and awards as well as a variety of educational programs and special exhibitions.

Culture and Arts Department