The Met’s Social Media Manager Kimberly Drew on Black Contemporary Art, Public Speaking, and More

And she's just getting started.
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Photo: Clement Pascal

“Whenever I speak, I think about the saying, Don’t speak unless you’re improving upon silence,” says Kimberly Drew, the curator and advocate behind social media at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Every time I make noise, I want it to be really good.” When she’s not posting for the iconic New York City museum, Kimberly broadcasts her own voice as a guest on national panels, to over 100,000 followers on Instagram and Twitter as @museummammy, and via the Tumblr phenomenon Black Contemporary Art. (If you're not obsessed already, do yourself a major favor and add all three to your daily scroll.) “I started the blog in 2011, right after my internship at the Studio Museum in Harlem, as a space to both record the things I learned and continue the process of learning,” she muses. “I started looking for something like it in the world, and when I didn’t find it, I just made my own.”

She might be the definition of #careergoals today, but Kimberly didn’t always have it all figured out. “When I got to college, I wanted to study math, but I realized it wasn’t the right fit,” says the Smith College graduate. “So I moved from hardcore number crunching to civil engineering as a way to try to bridge my interests. And then civil engineering brought me to architecture, and then that brought me to art history, so it was a very wind-y path! I was definitely not one of those people who showed up on the first day and was like, This is what I’m studying! I actually didn’t start my art history major until my junior year.”

If this is a major relief for those struggling to select a major, shy girls will revel in the fact that the seasoned public speaker doesn't consider herself loud. “I’ve always been a very quiet person, which is funny now because I’m so public!” she says. Just this year, Kimberly has spoken at venerable venues like the New Museum of Contemporary Art, Art Basel Miami Beach, and the Brooklyn Museum, but her expertise spans far beyond the art and tech worlds. “Advice I wish I had gotten earlier is to take myself more seriously, and take my interests more seriously,” she says. “My advice to girls is just to be obsessed with things and find value in that obsession. Be able to turn that into something that makes you feel like your life is worth living, not necessarily just in relation to your career, but on a mental health level, too.”

Of course, Kimberly is just getting started. Be on the lookout for her next project, a book with writer Jenna Wortham from their Black Futures project, which will explore creativity as it relates to black cultural identity. After that, who’s to say…world domination, perhaps?

Related: How This 18-Year-Old Went From Research Class to Winning Google’s Science Fair

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