Director for arts brings big acts to Carolina

Emil Kang has built a lot during the last five years — an internationally renowned performing arts series, a bustling artistic development office, his own job — but he still feels like he wants to do more.

“I want the arts to be as big and as important as basketball on this campus,” said Kang, the University’s executive director for the arts. “I see a kind of intramural arts organization, where if a student wants to paint, or sign up for music lessons or sculpt, they can.”

Kang dreams big. Yet in the five and a half years since former Chancellor James Moeser created the office of the executive director for the arts, his expansive vision for the arts at the University has largely succeeded.

“The impact has been enormous,” Moeser said. Moeser’s administration selected Kang as Carolina’s artistic champion when an extensive renovation of Memorial Hall came to a close in late 2004, prompting a campus-wide audit of the arts.

It was decided that the artistic community needed greater coordination and visibility, Moeser said.

“A venue is only a space,” he said. “It’s what goes on in that space that matters.”

That was left up to Kang, who, fresh off a successful stint as the president and executive director of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, was hired in 2004 as a result of a national search.

It was never a job Kang thought he wanted.

“My goal had been to become the president of the New York Philharmonic,” Kang said. “But at 35, I was burnt out.”

Still, Kang brought his connections from his previous career to his new position in Chapel Hill, creating the first season of Carolina Performing Arts — featuring Detroit Symphony regulars like Leonard Slatkin and Ithzak Perlman — in less than four months.

“We knew then we had made the right choice,” Moeser said. “Emil did in four months what normally takes 12.”

From the beginning, Kang was focused on making the University a true bright spot on the North American artistic circuit, he said.

“It was always important to make the University a destination, and not just a stop,” Kang said.

Kang continued to use his positive personal relationships with the larger international artistic community to boost the caliber of the annual performance series, bringing a diverse mix of globally renowned artists and innovative musical pairings.

He launched ambitious commission programs, in which original works sponsored by his office premiered on the Memorial Hall stage.

“It’s really important to have a place where artists want to come and perform,” said Michelle Bordner, director of artist relations for Carolina Performing Arts. “The season has become what it is today because of Emil’s positive relationships with artists.”

But Kang’s relationships extend beyond the stage to encompass the larger student and faculty population on campus, just as his position includes so much more than the yearly series at Memorial Hall.

“Both directly and indirectly, a big part of Emil’s vision is to connect with students,” said Reed Colver, director of campus and community engagement for Carolina Performing Arts.

Kang teaches a first year seminar on music and performance with Moeser, and he serves as a sort of informal adviser for dozens of students.

“There’s just this immense spirit of generosity that Emil has,” said Amy Zhang, who graduated in 2009 and is now in an arts graduate program at Columbia University in New York — a position that Kang encouraged her to pursue.

Many of Kang’s informal web of mentees now work for him in the office of the executive director for the arts.

“I always said I wanted to be Emil when I grew up, and now here I am,” said Sean McKeithan, Carolina Performing Arts’ marketing and communications coordinator and a graduate of the class of 2009.

Of the dozen or so members of Kang’s staff, at least five are recent UNC alumni.

“Being around students is something that really inspires him,” Bordner said.

Indeed, Kang says his larger vision is drawing out the artistic side of everyone, be it his six-year-old daughter, whose art work adorns his office in the Carr Building, or the “other 90 percent” of the campus population who doesn’t directly interact with the arts.

“I really love helping students and artists uncover their own possibilities,” Kang said.

“I feel like I’ve become a kind of catalyst for their potential.”

Contact the Arts Editor at artsdesk@unc.edu.