Kim Sajet wants the Milwaukee Art Museum to be more than a luxury

More than six months into her role as director of the Milwaukee Art Museum, Kim Sajet has one guiding goal: make the arts more than a luxury in the lives of Milwaukeeans.

Arriving in Milwaukee late in 2025, Sajet is already one of the most recognizable, public-facing arts leaders in the city.

She's been spotted dining with Milwaukee restaurateur Paul Bartolotta, chanting in a sea of Brewers fans at American Family Field, and touring local art institutions, like Sculpture Milwaukee installations and the Museum of Wisconsin Art in West Bend.

But public cameos and formal events are only part of what have made many people remark on her warmth and personability. Anyone walking through the museum with Sajet should expect to be interrupted – not by urgent business, but by Sajet introducing herself to museum guests.

Quite different from a presupposed stately, mysterious museum director known only by a headshot, one of Sajet's greatest gifts is her disarming presence.

At the President Circle's preview of the museum's Gertrude Abercrombie exhibit, Sajet, surrounded by a sea of business formal attire, donned a silk blue wide-brimmed fedora, a matching silk blouse and a black hoop skirt, resembling a figure in one of Abercrombie's paintings down to the stuffed black cat she carried throughout night.

Sajet may also represent a necessary institutional turn toward openness, transparency and collaboration, especially after the museum found itself in hot water with a Milwaukee County Board supervisor last year.

The museum, which receives operating funds from Milwaukee County, faced scrutiny over what County Board Supervisor Steve Taylor called then-director Marcelle Polednik's "bloated" salary and the museum's "reckless" expenditures. The museum said her salary was "principally funded" through an endowment gift from Donna and Donald Baumgartner, for which the position is named. Polednik left her position at the end of July , and Sajet stepped into the role in September.

Extending the art museum beyond its walls

According to Sajet, museums are not insular institutions, demarcated by the walls that hold their collections. They are pivotal players in the urban development, artistic landscape and overall wellness of cities.

"We're still very much in the building phase in Milwaukee," she said. "And arts and culture can really play a role in terms of urban planning, education, healthcare."

Under her leadership, she hopes the art museum will invest in the arts beyond its walls, starting with the land just outside it.

In a March Instagram post , Sajet floated a potential partnership with Sculpture Milwaukee to create a sculpture garden outside the art museum along Lake Michigan, inspired by Pt. Leo Estate in Victoria, Australia.

But Sajet's plans extend beyond the museum's land. She's already begun proposing art-forward twists to landscape and urban development projects throughout the city, like the Lakefront Gateway Plaza that was proposed as part of the city's Connec+ing MKE – Downtown Plan 2040." Advocating for an art-forward yet functional design that is both aesthetically pleasing and accessible, Sajet wants the plaza to be more than a place to play.

For Sajet, public beautification projects go beyond aesthetic upgrades for the city. They are one of many ways Sajet plans to use the museum to positively affect mental and physical health outcomes throughout Milwaukee.

"There's evidence coming in that there's a real correlation between access to arts and your mental and physical health," she said. "In the conversations I've been having with ... often non-arts organizations, there's a real willingness to say, let's think about how we integrate all of these different elements of live, work and play."

At a recent Wisconsin Department of Transportation community meeting about I-794, Sajet proposed that the department involve artists and creative professionals as it weighs options for repairing, reconfiguring or removing a portion of the aging freeway .

"It's almost your first experience driving over that freeway, right, when you're coming from Chicago or elsewhere?" Sajet said. "Are there ways we can make it beautiful, if that's possible, rather than just a big concrete thing? What are the other [art-forward] options that we can do as sort of a connector from one side of the city to another side of the city?"

Expanding the art museum's reach in the city, Sajet said, also will help attract new audiences. At the top of her list: young people.

"I think most people, particularly Gen Z, they want to have unique experiences and to be in dialogue with others that sort of changes you in some way," Sajet said.

Exhibitions like the Abercrombie retrospective reflect a turn toward more interactive experiences that even those who aren't artistically inclined might enjoy. At the end of the exhibit, viewers are invited into a sitting room that has a vintage-style photo booth, plus archival images of Abercrombie they can take home for free.

A test of the limits of free expression

Sajet arrived in Milwaukee as a kind of martyr for the cause of cultural diversity and freedom of expression.

Her very public resignation from the National Portrait Gallery followed direct attacks from President Trump, who called Sajet "a strong supporter of DEI, which is totally inappropriate for her position," on Truth Social.

Since arriving in the Midwest, she has publicly defended her positions, advocating for a museum mission that protects a diversity of viewpoints.

"What I would suggest even more so [is] really needed today is for [the museum] to be a safe place for challenging ideas," Sajet said while speaking to the Rotary Club of Milwaukee in February.

Yet freedom of expression hasn't been as simple for Sajet to defend in practice.

During the museum's annual Scholastic Art Awards exhibit, which was on display Jan. 31 through March 15, one student exhibited paintings that reprimanded the museum for censoring the work she was originally supposed to showcase. Sajet was directly involved in the decision to censor the student's work.

The Scholastic Art Awards are juried regionally by a panel of three judges who review student work submitted from across designated regions. Selected works from Wisconsin-based students are then exhibited at the Milwaukee Art Museum. While the museum exhibits the work, museum staff are generally not involved in the artwork selection process.

One student, whose body of work foregrounds Palestinian culture, the violence in Gaza and America's complicity in it, submitted several pieces that the jurors unanimously selected to be in the exhibit.

According to Sajet, someone who was offended by a word in one of the student's pieces brought a complaint to museum staff. Sajet told the student she was welcome to put her other work up, but she would have to take that particular piece down.

In an April interview with the Journal Sentinel, Sajet said that she and other museum staff believed the work crossed a red line by using an Arabic word that "calls for violence against an individual or group of individuals."

Sajet confirmed she spoke with the student, who explained that in her interpretation, the word does not call for violence. The student's family declined to talk to the Journal Sentinel about the incident.

In the place of her original work, Sajet allowed the student to put up several pieces that directly called out the museum, with phrases like "this artist was censored by the Milwaukee Art Museum" and "free Palestine," among other things.

"I think one of my favorite things she created [was] a little drawing of a hand holding a paintbrush with chains on it. I thought it was very clever," Sajet said. "She was still able to say how she felt about things, but I just feel that the museum needs to be a place where everybody feels welcome. That doesn't mean you don't get challenged."

Still, given the reputation she rode into Milwaukee championing, the decision to censor a young artist's work raises questions about where Sajet will draw the line in the future.

"What we said to everybody is that, in this particular case, this didn't align with our values," said Sajet, who is not the only local leader to face questions about the limits of free expression regarding Palestine and Israel. In July 2024, administrators at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee suspended five pro-Palestinian student groups for social media posts the local Jewish community claimed were intimidating.

More than that, it raises questions about the role of the museum in a country grappling with its definition of free speech, and where antisemitism, though still dangerously prevalent, has been used as a pretext for stifling pro-Palestinian symbols and ideas.

"The optics of that decision does make it feel like an artist like myself, a Milwaukee artist who creates art about … the dehumanization of Arab life and their land and the whole American involvement in all that ... it does make it seem that my work would not be accepted in those spaces," said David Najib Kasir, a local Arab painter whose work depicts American involvement in ongoing violence in the Middle East.

Sajet, given her role and reputation, was likely to face scrutiny whatever decision she made. In this climate, free speech questions can be messy to navigate, as institutions and individuals across the nation try to figure out where exactly the line should be drawn, what makes speech or expression violent, and how to best protect people and their freedoms.

As Sajet strives to make art more than a luxury in the lives of Milwaukeeans, she may again be faced with the limits of free expression and the tension between creating a museum for everyone and exhibiting provocative, challenging works.

Anya Sesay covers arts and culture for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Send her story ideas, things to see and people to meet at asesay@usatodayco.com . Follow her on Instagram @anyanic0lette .

Anya's reporting is supported by the Richard and Ethel Herzfeld Foundation, the Maine-based Rabkin Foundation, and reader contributions to the Journal Sentinel Community-Funded Journalism Project . Journal Sentinel editors maintain full editorial control over all content. To support this work, visit jsonline.com/support . Checks can be addressed to Local Media Foundation (memo: "JS Community Journalism") and mailed to P.O. Box 85015, Chicago, IL 60689.

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This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Milwaukee Art Museum is more than a nice thing to have says Kim Sajet