Photograph by Chris von Holle
A light snow blows outside her office window on this Friday in December, just five days before Christmas. But Sso-Rha Kang doesn’t even glance at the wintry scene. Her gaze fixates on the printouts of color-coded floor plans and copies of about 20 images arranged in neat rows on her desk.
The papers mentally transport her down the hall to the first floor gallery of The Carnegie in Covington, where she’s methodically constructing a new world. She calls it Notations on Ritual.
The curator for Northern Kentucky’s only multidisciplinary arts venue points to one of the plans. The boxes represent Carnegie galleries, she explains, and today she’s focused on configuring the first floor’s sprawling gallery. But the plans also include layouts for five smaller spaces on the second level. Pocket galleries, she calls them.
Kang’s world will extend across all six spaces during the first art exhibition of The Carnegie’s 2025 season, opening March 14. She’s learned not to work on pieces of the world in isolation; she needs to see everything at once to create a cohesive environment.
She gestures to the plans’ colored lines, indicating possible places where eight artists will live in her new world. Her goal is to find them all homes where their paintings, photos, sculptures, and installations can converse with nearby art as well as with exhibition viewers.
Kang, who turns 33 this month, usually works this virtual world-building exercise on her computer, cutting and pasting the colored lines without visual aids. She generates new plans as she goes. The variations are many. (Her last show went through more than 60 iterations before she felt everything was right.) “I can just see it in my head,” she says.
She’s following her usual routine today, but she’s printed the floor plans, along with artwork images, to help me visualize her process. She sweeps her hand across the papers. “This is me working through it,” she says. “I will do this until I know it’s done.”
Kang’s curatorial world-building process is slow, deliberate, thoughtful. You might even describe it as boring. She wouldn’t mind. She sees significance in the seemingly ordinary, productivity in the act of pondering.
She wrote once, “Banal scenes become sites of consideration, which elevate fleeting moments of the everyday to loaded sentimental encounters.” The words were part of the exhibition description for her first solo curatorial project, Sentiments of Here. Since then, she’s built a career exploring the layers beneath banality.
Sso-Rha Kang began her role as curator for The Carnegie in fall 2023. The exhibition schedule for 2024 had already been set; she spent her first year primarily carrying out someone else’s vision.
Notations on Ritual will be her Carnegie introduction of sorts—a showcase for her ideas, her aesthetic preferences, and her perspective on the organization’s future. But it’s far from her debut in the regional arts community.
She’s curated about 20 shows at a dozen galleries since her first
co-curator credit in 2017. Her start came at Meyers Gallery, part of the University of Cincinnati College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning. Kang worked in UC’s galleries while earning her master’s degrees in art history and continued as exhibitions coordinator for a year and a half following graduation. She’s since put together shows for Wave Pool, Pearlman Gallery, Third Space Gallery, the Contemporary Arts Center, and the Weston Art Gallery, among other institutions. She taught at UC, the Art Academy of Cincinnati, and Northern Kentucky University, where she curated exhibitions and organized events as the director of galleries and outreach from 2021 to 2023.
Kang earned national exposure as a co-consultant for the state of Ohio in the exhibition New Worlds: Women to Watch, which opened last summer at the National Museum for Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. A related touring exhibition of Ohio-based arts appeared at six venues across the state in 2023 and 2024.
At the Carnegie, she’s jumping into the shoes of Matt Distel, who served as exhibitions director for a decade before his promotion to executive director in 2023. “I have so much respect for what he’s done,” she says. The jump sometimes seems like a big leap for her.
But those who have witnessed Kang’s world-building in action describe the new role as a natural next step for someone who’s earned a reputation for highly researched, carefully crafted exhibits that engage audiences and capture the essence of artists’ intent. “It’s been such a joy to see her become the badass that she is,” says Stephanie Sadre-Orafai.
The UC anthropology professor was in her first day of teaching at the university in 2010 when Kang, a freshman, walked into her Anthropology of Media class. “That spark and promise and curiosity have always been there,” recalls Sadre-Orafai, who became a mentor. “The way she thinks about the gallery space is very poetic and very anthropologic.”
Independent writer and curator Maria Seda-Reeder, former exhibitions director at Wave Pool Gallery, also met Kang while teaching at UC. She remembers a smart student and a profoundly outside-of-the-box thinker and had a hunch Kang would make an excellent curator. The job requires a particular demeanor that errs on the side of working with the visions of artists, she says. “Sso-Rha had that in spades.”
In 2019, Seda-Reeder recommended Kang apply for Wave Pool’s curatorial residency. The position led to Kang’s solo curation of Sentiments of Here, which grew out of her master’s thesis, “The Mood of Nothing: Depictions of Extraordinary Banality.” Kang laughs at the memory. “That’s a very long title,” she says. “Very ‘art history’ heavy.”
Kang hoped that exploring her thesis topic in physical form would resolve some of the unfinished feelings she had about her academic research paper. Maybe it would work better as an exhibition than it did as a piece of writing, she thought.
She considers how to explain the concept of a show that began with the idea of nothingness. “It was the sense that some of the art I was drawn to was very reductive and banal,” she says. But in reality, those same pieces could seem beautiful and striking. “I was thinking of the paradox. I was thinking about how we feel about art. How something makes you feel something.”
She stops mid-thought. “I can feel this getting wordy and heady,” she says, and she doesn’t want that.
But after some encouragement, Kang digs a little deeper. The Wave Pool show applied her perspective on banality to qualities of the Midwest, she says, noting the region can seem plain. “I think about corn fields,” she says. “My high school was flanked by them.”
While at Wave Pool, Kang frequently interacted with curators from around the world, and many of them questioned why she chose to live in Cincinnati—perhaps judging the city based on the region’s stereotypical reputation. She hoped the exhibition could reveal the underlying richness of the place she calls home.
Sentiments ran in January and February 2020. “I thought it would be a one-and-done experience,” she says, remembering how terrified she felt then. “I’m a very private person. Curating is very public. It scared me.”
Distel saw the show and invited her to guest curate an exhibit at The Carnegie, Gestures of Slowness, with a theme of time and stillness. Kang’s show description references “seemingly uneventful, empty, and silent spaces.” Ironically, its summer 2020 run coincided with COVID’s emergence, when empty public spaces became the norm.
The pandemic deprived the show of the attention it deserved, Distel says. But Kang’s curatorial style left an impression that he’d remember when The Carnegie began searching for his replacement a few years later.
Photograph by Chris von Holle
Kang became director of galleries and outreach at Northern Kentucky University in 2021. She credits an encounter with a renowned but misunderstood piece of banal artwork as one reason for accepting the job.
She noticed an aluminum box sculpture sitting on a grassy patch in the center of campus as she walked to her interview. She recognized it as the work of minimalist Donald Judd and began to ask about its presence at NKU. The university’s art department leaders had little information.
The university commissioned Judd to create the piece in 1977. As minimalist artwork often does, it sparked a mix of criticism, interest, and confusion. Over the years, though, the significance of the sculpture students call The Box had largely been forgotten, Kang discovered. Several faculty and staff shared rumors that Judd had disowned the work, exposing a mystery she determined to solve.
Rachael Banks, a photography professor and member of the gallery director search committee, remembers the response to Kang’s fascination with The Box. “She was so excited, and everybody else was like, I don’t get it,” says Banks, who notes the responses didn’t deter Kang. She pursued and won a grant to visit Marfa, Texas, home of the Judd Foundation, where she pored through Judd’s archives and interviewed experts. She learned the artist had never disowned the sculpture. “It is very much still his,” she says.
When time allows, Kang hopes to publish her findings about a dispute that’s likely the source of the disownment rumors, but her research efforts have already had an impact on campus. Banks, at least, now takes notice of the sculpture she’d passed without thought for eight years before Kang researched its history. “Sso-Rha looks at things beyond what you see at the surface and really extracts that deeper meaning,” she says. And once you have that insight, she says, you can’t look at something the same way again.
Banks says she now thinks of Kang whenever she passes The Box. She even contemplates the significance of its place in the art landscape.
Kang became known at NKU for experimenting with offbeat events intended to make art more inviting and accessible for students. She invited the multimedia arts group Froghole to give outdoor performances and collaborated with the campus literary club to host a combination open mic night, photo exhibit, concert, and poetry reading in the gallery.
On a more personal level, Kang organized Here and There: Navigating the Cultural In-Between, which featured 15 ceramic artists with Korean heritage and explored how they negotiate bicultural identities. The show received international acclaim and was featured in an issue of Korean Ceramic Monthly. It was the first time Kang, who was born in South Korea and immigrated to the U.S. at age 5, had connected curatorial work with her cultural identity so directly. She remembers the event as an amazing experience and discovered wide-ranging connections with the artists.
“I feel like [there] was a fear that people were going to try to pigeonhole me as a Korean curator,” she says, emphasizing that she’s never felt boxed in by Cincinnati’s arts community. But she sees a larger issue, rooted in systemic racism, that can limit opportunities for nonwhite artists.
She wrestled with the issue again last fall when she took on Memory Fields, an exhibition showcasing the works of artists of Eastern Asian descent. This time she decided to address the topic less directly by purposefully not including the artists’ cultural identities in promotional mate rials. “When you contextualize a show about identity, people often arrive with an expectation that it’s supposed to look a certain way,” she says, noting they often assume the work is tied to immigration and/or trauma.
Kang appreciates artists who use their work to address such important topics, but she wanted to give these artists freedom to tackle the “memory” theme more broadly. She also hoped to make the artists’ messages more relatable to people of all backgrounds. “Doing that was weirdly subversive,” she says. “I think it was sadly subversive.”
Weston Art Gallery Director Michael Goodson, who hosted the show, believes the layered approach worked well. “It really was a tool to open the viewer up and not create a polarized experience,” he says.
Emily Hanako Momohara, head of the photography track and interim chair of studio arts at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, recommended Kang as the curator for Memory Fields and later participated as an artist in the show. She describes Kang’s relationships with artists as unique. “I don’t think a lot of curators go to that level of really trying to understand your work and its relationships to other works,” she says. “Sso-Rha literally goes piece by piece, figuring out how they go together contextually. She’s just an incredible curator.”
Photograph by Chris von Holle
For this new Carnegie exhibit, Kang invited artists to broadly explore themes of ritual “from objects that we hold with reverence to superstitions that dictate behavior or systems that maintain or subvert expectations.” If you ask her about inspirations for the theme, she says she sees connections to “rituals” in almost every aspect of her life.
It links to her bicultural Korean-American upbringing and athletic team experience at Mason High School. Since immigrating to this country as a child, she’s learned ritualistic practices from both cultures—the different ways they celebrate holidays, the levels of formality in the languages—and she navigates between them as needed. “It’s something that can happen very organically,” she says. “If I’m with a group of Korean people, even my mannerisms can change.”
In high school, her world centered on the tennis court. She played on Mason’s varsity team all four years, serving as captain her senior year. She was small but competitive. “I really didn’t like to lose, so I played to the very last point,” she says.
Kang dropped tennis after she was accepted into UC. But Notations on Ritual has rekindled memories of the customs of sport. She recalls the way she bounced the ball before the serve. Everyone has a different rhythm, she says, and it’s almost meditative in a way. She brings it back to her world today. “It’s kind of similar to how I think about certain artists or painters, how they get into a certain meditative zone,” she says. “I think they call it a flow state.”
She even connects the theme to more whimsical aspects of her everyday life, like her tendency to follow expressions of hope and good fortune with the pronouncement “Knock on wood!” and a tap on the nearest thing resembling maple, oak, hickory, or cherry. She did this so often during the installation of Memory Fields that it became an inside joke.
“I know it’s ridiculous and makes no sense,” she says. “But it makes me feel better.” To not do it seems like tempting fate. She shrugs. “Why risk it?” Some might call it a superstitious habit, but Kang sees a ritualistic practice.
The layers of Notations on Ritual also apply to the other word in the show’s title. Notations reflect the musical aspects of rituals, and the artists will explore the repetition and tempo of their studio practices. Behind the scenes, Kang also thinks about musical compositions when designing her worlds: notes on a score, rhythm and sound, and empty spaces between the notes. The spaces are as important as the notes themselves, she says. She likes empty space and intentionally leaves certain walls open in her exhibitions. “I find the fewer works there are the more time people tend to spend with them,” she says. “It offers people time to make connections.”
On this wintry December day, the rhythm and flow of Notations on Ritual play out in her head as Kang reworks her floor plans yet again. To the casual eye, the plans reveal little beyond the permanent fixtures of the iconic Carnegie building, which opened in 1904 as home to the Covington Public Library. The structure, funded by philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, is recognized for its Beaux-Arts architecture and has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1972. It’s not the typical art gallery space—you can still see the circulation desk’s imprint on the first level floor.
An unnamed circle in the center of the first floor gallery box designates an enormous dome-topped rotunda overlook. A ladder-like diagram near the Scott Street entrance indicates the building’s dual staircases leading to a circular balcony and the pocket galleries above. Such architectural features pose challenges for curators accustomed to planning shows against a backdrop of long white walls, but Kang appreciates the quirky layout. She describes the space as “beautiful, ornate, and detailed.” She pauses, her serious expression sliding into a grin. The Carnegie, she says, gives artists and curators a lot of room to play.
Photograph by Chris von Holle
Notations on Ritual will feature eight artists playing with media and styles ranging from Hannah Parrett’s relief carvings whittled in foam and wood to Aubrey Theobald’s interactive installation incorporating a collection of sounds. In two weeks of maneuvering digital boxes, Kang has generated 10 floor plan variations.
In the latest iteration, six yellow lines signify Brett Davis’s photo transparencies, which will activate the first floor’s massive windows, creating a stained-glass effect in bright reds, yellows, blues, and greens. Kang thinks they’ll contrast nicely with Rachael Banks’s series of black-and-white images from cameras placed along a deer trail in her Newport backyard. A black line marks the spot for the deer pictures for now, but their final location remains uncertain.
A squiggly blue blob in the corner of the first floor gallery represents the possible home of a wooden table custom-built in the shape of a mulberry for showcasing a collection of Erika NJ Allen’s porcelain fruits. The blob location, too, may change. Kang isn’t sure the 4-by-8-foot table can hold its own in the almost 3,000-square-foot space beneath the massive rotunda.
“It’s a beast of a gallery,” she says with a note of awe during a tour of the physical space. She looks across the gallery and shakes her head. “It’s really big.” If the mulberry table looks overwhelmed, Kang says she’ll probably move it upstairs. But that would introduce a new note in her visual score and possibly disrupt the entire composition.
Through the floor plans, Kang tries to catch and resolve problems long before the installation phase begins. She acknowledges a fear of failing and worries that something will go wrong. “It’s a group show, and I’m kind of the connection point with everyone,” she says. “I want to make sure I’m finding the right balance. My job is to make sure it’s a cohesive, full composition.” In her ideal world, nothing would be left unresolved. But she knows that reality, like most things in life, is complex.
Kang’s show description for Notations on Ritual reads, in part, “Rituals are a form of world building with the ability to create atmospheres and conjure moods, which can produce tremendous affect that can range from paranoia, fear, comfort, safety, and joy.” The essay highlights the rituals reflected in the artists’ work—ecological concerns in Ceirra Evans’s depiction of river baptisms, Calista Lyon’s research on the behavior of clouds, and depictions of care and community in Dianna Settles’s paintings.
The description intentionally avoids mention of Kang’s personal connections to the ritual theme. While her words may also capture the emotions and rhythms of her curatorial process, she prefers to keep those connections beneath the surface. The exhibit, she says, should focus on the artists.
Kang finds comfort in the artists when she’s caught in the grasp of her own ritualistic paranoia and fear. Their work, she thinks, is good. She just needs to give it space to breathe and look its best. And, of course, it wouldn’t hurt to knock on wood.
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