American Magazine, July 2015

Regal portraits of Queen Henrietta Maria and
Frederick Douglass hang high in the Entrance Hall
in Government House, the official residence of Maryland’s
governor and his family. They’re the kind of stately works
one would expect to find in the formal, public portion
of the 125-year-old Georgian-style brick estate, which
sits behind an iron fence among meticulously manicured
shrubs, impossibly green grass, and beds of colorful
flowers on State Circle in the heart of historic Annapolis.
Pass through a few more elegant public spaces into the
private lower family room, where the leather couch and
flat-screen TV offer refuge from the harsh glare of political
life, and the art that adorns the walls is very different. A
landscape depicting trees whose trunks cross seamlessly
contains deep blues, grays, and rich browns. Pieces ranging
from Asian-inspired ink drawings to Western abstract and
expressionist paintings are displayed throughout the home,
adding a personal touch to the mansion, whose current
inhabitants are perhaps its unlikeliest.
The artist of these contemporary works, Yumi Hogan,
CAS/MFA ’10, is from Naju, a South Korean town about
175 miles south of Seoul and a world away—literally and
figuratively—from the most opulent public dwelling
in Maryland.
Six months after her husband Larry’s stunning upset
victory made him just the second Republican in the past
four decades to win the state’s highest elected office—and
her the first Korean-born wife of a governor in the United
States—Hogan is sitting in a wooden armchair in the
formal living room, still trying to wrap her head around
how it happened.
“It’s like a museum,” the first lady says of her new home,
which also houses paintings from the Peabody Art Collection
by such masters as Alice Worthington Ball, Charles Willson
Peale, and Francis Guy. She’s stylishly dressed in white
wedges, a red pencil skirt, and a ruffled white blouse. Her
black hair is perfectly coiffed. “Still, it’s not like my house.
You never know your future, how it will change.”
That reality leveled the first family in June, when
the governor was diagnosed with cancer—an advanced,
aggressive form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The
disease is the latest challenge for Hogan, whose path has
meandered more than the creek outside her previous
home, in Edgewater, Maryland, where her husband, a
real estate developer who never before held public office,
built her a third-floor art studio with plenty of windows.
The youngest of eight children, Hogan grew up far from
all this, on a chicken farm in Jeonnam Province. An artistic
soul from birth, as a little girl she would walk through the
woods near the farm and take note of the angles and color
of the trees. When coloring with her friends, she told them
that they should make the sky bluer.
“Ever since I was young, that was my dream: ‘I’m going
to be a teacher and artist,’” she says.
Pursuit of that goal brought Hogan and her first
husband to America when she was just 18 (19 in Korean,
An artistic soul
from birth, as
a little girl she
would walk
through the woods
near the farm
and take note of
the angles and
color of the trees.
because when a baby is born there she is already 1). They
landed in Texas, where they had three daughters, but the
marriage eventually ended. After a stint in California, a
friend told her about the stellar public schools in Howard
County, Maryland.
A single mother who was determined to provide her
children with the best educational opportunities, she
moved her modern family cross-country, where she
found a job as a cashier and earned an associate’s degree
in art once her daughters were teenagers.
“I can’t remember ever wanting anything,” her
middle daughter, Jaymi Sterling, told Baltimore
magazine. “Looking back, I don’t know how she did it.”
Hogan was showing her work at an art show in 2001
when a man strolled in and handed her a business card.
“I was more interested in the artist than the art,” the
governor likes to say. Yumi didn’t call Larry for months,
but once they began dating, both were smitten. They
married in 2004, after which he encouraged her to attend
art school. She chose the Maryland Institute College of
Art (MICA), in Baltimore, where she teaches today.
“She was a very good student, extremely conscientious
and very serious about her work,” says Robert Merrill,
a professor in the humanistic studies department. “She
fell into the role as a kind of mentor and helper to a lot
of younger Korean students.”
At this time Hogan’s work was primarily abstract,
and she was interested mostly in Western styles and
materials. But as she earned her degree in painting and
then headed to graduate school at AU, her focus began
to shift.
“Her work became more personal, more connected
to her background,” says Luis Silva, director of AU’s
graduate program in studio art. “By the time she
left, I could see much more of her heritage. She was
using Asian techniques, but at the same time she had
a bit of Western influence. It’s really a melding of her
two worlds.”
“I was always really impressed with her openness,”
says AU art professor Tim Doud, who taught Hogan
in his contemporary theory and criticism course. “As a
graduate student, she was open to criticism and hearing
other people’s ideas.”
For her MFA thesis show, she exhibited primarily
works of sumi ink on Korean hanji paper, a method
she teaches today at MICA.
“Teachers are all different, but I think her style
is perfect because she is able to help develop the
independence and creativity of students, but also impose
a certain amount of external discipline,” Merrill says.
“She’s extremely caring about people as individuals.
She likes to get to know people, think about how they
experience learning, and then do what she can to foster
and develop that. She’s got a good balance of being strict
and pushing students, but also understanding their
individual needs and pace of learning.”
20 AMERICAN MAGAZINE JULY 2015