Before unpacking a single box in Seattle, Rangsook Yoon has already made an impression. The Frye Art Museum’s newly appointed Senior Director of Curatorial Affairs is still in Sarasota, Florida, finishing the installation of a sweeping exhibition featuring 95 works from 10 regional collectors, coordinating a cross-country move with her husband, a dog, and four cats; and she is already fielding interview requests from a city she has not yet moved to. “I haven’t even started work there,” she said, with audible warmth. “What an honor.”
That sense of quiet astonishment in being seen before she has arrived says something about both Yoon and the institution she is joining. The Frye, tucked into First Hill with its founding collection of Munich Secessionist works and a long commitment to Pacific Northwest artists, has chosen someone whose professional identity resists easy categories. The museum’s director used one word to describe her: unicorn.
“I absolutely love it,” Yoon said of the label. “The search process was very intense and rigorous. They were looking for someone with a variety of experiences and qualities. And I really felt: yes, I am a unicorn.”
Yoon holds a doctoral degree in German early modern art, with a secondary specialization in 19th and early 20th century modernism. Her dissertation research took her to Munich, where she developed direct familiarity with the Munich Secessionist tradition at the center of the Frye’s founding collection. But her expertise does not stop at the archive. Over the course of a career in Florida institutions, she has created more than 50 exhibitions, including large-scale immersive and site-specific installations made in collaboration with living artists, work that requires a fundamentally different skill set than scholarship.
Add to that: extensive managerial experience, a background mentoring junior curators, a deep commitment to writing, and the fact that she is Asian in a city where the Asian diasporic community is large, visible, and culturally central. “What is the chance that the Frye meets someone who can also mentor and coach junior curators?” she said. “I love writing. I can help with that. And I also happen to be Asian, in a city like Seattle.” She paused, smiled with broad radiance, and then laughed.
The Frye’s founding collection poses a question that Yoon finds generative rather than intimidating: How does a museum rooted in a very particular strain of European cultural identity become a home for everyone? She approaches the Secessionist works not as insider material but as a set of stories waiting to be told differently.
“The founders were children of immigrants who found their way back to their ancestral roots,” she says. “They bought works that were, at the time, considered contemporary and edgy. And then they decided to give everything to the community.” Those storylines of immigrant longing, of collecting as an act of reconnection, of generosity toward a city, matter more to her than the modernist movements themselves. “Those are the connections that make the collection relevant to so many people.”
Her time in Munich gave her a particular vantage point on European art scholarship. She arrived in the early 2000s, before the Korean Wave (Hallyu) and the global spread of Korean popular culture reshaped how Asian scholars were received in European academic spaces. “There were hardly any foreigners at the university center,” she recalled. “I felt I was a very rare sighting.” German was a learned language for her, not a native one, a disadvantage in a culture with little patience for imperfect fluency, but also a lens. She approached the material differently than European-background scholars could. The traditional scholarship around figures like Albrecht Dürer, Max Beckmann, or Otto Dix, she notes, has long remained quite conservative, focused on native interpretive frameworks. Her outsider position became an analytical asset.
Yoon grew up in South Korea as part of the majority, she did not have to learn to navigate minority status until she came to America. Her husband, Guyanese by background, shares the experience. Together, they have arrived at a phrase that captures their position in the world: “We don’t belong anywhere, but we belong everywhere.”
It is, according to Yoon, the foundation of her practice as a bridge builder, someone adept at finding the commonalities between and among the people she encounters, and at creating the conditions for those encounters to happen. “I find my identity and my personal mission as a bridge builder,” she said. “And I love working in a museum because that’s where those bridge-building opportunities can arise, through artworks, through events, through formal and informal dialogue.”
Before art history, there was French literature. Yoon studied it in Seoul, voraciously consuming poetry, film, and music as a way into a culture that fascinated her. She was young, and did not know exactly what she was looking for, only that beauty and storytelling pulled her forward. Looking back, she does not think it had to be French literature specifically. “It could have been Korean literature, or Spanish literature. But it gave me a way into art history.” The fascination with literary and visual language never left. The poetry she read in her early twenties, she said, shaped the way she learned to read any language, whether on the page or on a gallery wall.
Yoon is careful not to arrive at the Frye with a fixed vision. “I am not the type of person who goes in and says: this is my vision, let’s do this.” She is more interested in learning what Seattle needs, how the Frye can create its own niche, and how to distinguish the museum from others without chasing blockbusters. What she does bring is a framework: the museum as a third space, a place that is neither home nor work, where people gather to be inspired, be moved, and ponder together. It animates everything she describes. Making kimchi together. Making dumplings together. Making art together.
One of her practical priorities is dismantling the separation between the Frye’s European modernist collection and its contemporary programming, which have historically been presented as distinct tracks. She wants to intentionally interweave their storylines, using contemporary artists, who so often explore identity and shared human experience, as a bridge to make century-old works feel alive again. “People love Van Gogh and Monet partly because they already know the names,” she observed. “The Frye’s collection has not always been presented with the interpretive frameworks that let audiences connect to it in the same way. That is our curatorial responsibility.”
A museum on Pill Hill
First Hill has a nickname most Seattleites know well: Pill Hill. The neighborhood is home to some of the city’s largest hospitals and medical centers, which means the people moving through it on any given day are patients, caregivers, medical workers, and families navigating illness, recovery, and aging. The Frye sits squarely in the middle of all of that. Yoon sees this geography as a curatorial opportunity.
“Museums are not just four walls of exhibitions where viewers stand and look,” she said. “There needs to be active participation. Learning can happen through social gatherings, through conversations, through hands-on activities. And that can happen just as meaningfully for people navigating age-related health challenges as for anyone else.”
Her thinking about accessibility was sharpened by years of working with retiree communities in Sarasota and Naples. The lessons were sometimes surprisingly concrete. Font size. Lighting. The design of a visual experience that does not assume a particular set of abilities or a body without limits. “I did not think about how important it is to increase the font size when I was younger,” she says, with a laugh. “Now I notice immediately. I am becoming that age myself.” ADA compliance, she added, is not a box to check. It is a fundamental curatorial consideration that should shape every exhibition from the beginning.
The Frye’s Creative Aging program, which serves all older adults including people living with dementia and their caregivers, already embodies this vision. Yoon sees it as a model and a foundation to build on. A museum that can hold space for someone with dementia; creating an experience that is meaningful, dignified, and joyful, is a museum that has genuinely rethought what it is for.
The third space concept, for Yoon, is inseparable from this. A gathering place in a medical district carries particular weight. People who spend their days in hospitals: waiting, worrying, accompanying someone they love through something hard. Communities need places to exhale. To share a cup of coffee in a café, and be uplifted by their senses. To be moved by something beautiful. To make something with their hands alongside other people. “I really believe in joy,” she says, “and in the power of gathering to reshape our world. The joy can be all different types. Beauty is also important. Even stories full of human suffering, we call them beautiful, because of what they reveal about our shared lives.”
Yoon was, for the duration of her Florida career, the only Asian institutional curator in the state. She did not think about that often. But she learned to think carefully about what visibility means. At exhibition openings across South Florida, she heard from colleagues that young Asian American artists and students had been quietly inspired by her presence, not just by her work, but by the fact that she showed up and was seen in leadership.
“Being a role model can take various shapes,” she said. “Being in a leadership role itself can be inspiring. The work needs to speak for itself. And showing up to community events, being seen, that matters too, not just for colleagues, but for younger generations.”
Throughout her career, Yoon has championed first solo exhibitions for emerging artists. She takes the responsibility seriously. “It is an honor to be able to give someone a platform through which they can just soar and fly,” she said. “But I have to hold their hands, or stay in the background, so they can really shape their visions. And it does not end there. These relationships continue, in the form of recommendations for residencies, fellowships, the things that build a career.”
Her own formation was shaped by the Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC) mentorship program, now called Propel, which pairs mid-career curators internationally with mentors and connects them to a broader professional community. “It helped me feel connected, motivated, and to find a way forward rather than giving up,” she said. She now serves as a mentor in the PACC (Professional Alliance for Curators of Color) program, supporting emerging professionals who are earlier in their careers. Georgia Erger and Alexis L. Silva, a Curator and Curatorial Assistant at the Frye, are also part of the AAMC network, one more thread connecting Yoon to the institution before she arrives.
The Frye celebrates its 75th anniversary in 2027. When asked what personal success would look like by then, Yoon does not reach for exhibition statistics or attendance figures. She reaches for relationships.
“I want to know pretty much everyone,” she said. “Feeling personal connections. Gaining their trust. Finding that I am a good partner in crime for possibilities and collaborations. Having great conversations about life and art. That is my personal mission.”
The hardest part of the move, she admitted, is not knowing many people in Seattle. She is arriving into a city and a community that is new to her. But she is arriving, she said, as a convener; someone who creates the conditions for people to gather, to find each other, to share something.
She and her husband bought a fixer-upper to remake their own, close enough to Lake Washington for morning walks. They fell in love with Seattle’s neighborhoods during a March house-hunting visit; the views, the trails, the restaurant scene, the sheer improbable variety of it. She is arriving mid-May, with a husband, dog, and four cats, to a city that has already started to welcome her.
When the Frye’s staff voted unanimously to hire her after her presentation, she found it almost overwhelming. “What an incredible thing,” she said quietly. “I hadn’t even started yet.”
She paused, then added: “I feel the same way about the Frye that the Frye seems to feel about me. I never thought there was an institution like this.”
