You’re most likely to spot lawyer Mina Juhn in or around Grand Central Terminal, visiting gallery shows in Chelsea or Tribeca, running along the Brooklyn waterfront, or having a beer with friends at her local Greenpoint bar. We talked with Mina about delivering babka to Claes Oldenburg and Kiki Smith, deciding to go to law school, filling her home with art from friends, and more.
on her morning routine
During the week I am usually up by 6:30 am, unless I am motivated enough to get up earlier to go to the gym or go for a run. I prepare a cup of green or black tea to get me through my morning routine and then another to go. I replaced my morning coffee with tea a few months ago and it’s done wonders for my tiredness and my mood. Then after a quick breakfast, I’m out the door.
On the weekends, I take things more slowly if I can. A slow weekend morning is such a luxury. I’ll start with some stretching or Pilates, make a cup of tea, and cook something elaborate for myself while chatting with my boyfriend, who lives in Berlin. I’ll then spend a few hours reading, either the book I’m currently working through or one of my coffee table books. Most of the latter are art- or architecture-related and I love seeing or learning something new as I page through them in the morning. I value having books around because they present an opportunity for so much discovery within the confines of one’s own home. I find these quiet reading hours to be the best way to start my day off feeling grounded and calm, and I have come to look forward to them during the week.
on feeling at home on both coasts
I spent my high school years in Princeton, New Jersey, which was a lovely place to spend those formative years. Prior to that, I lived in Northern and Southern California as a child, which shaped my sensibility in a big way. I was very excited to be on the East Coast when we moved, but whenever I’m back in California, it also feels like a distant home. The energy there is just so different from here.
on her early love of art and aesthetics
I was lucky that my parents always took me to museums growing up. Museums, along with bookstores and libraries, were always pitched to me as places to hang out, whether we were traveling or just exploring where we lived on the weekend. My dad is a history buff, and I feel like I inherited that love of history but with an approach that focused on material objects. Whenever I looked at a painting or sculpture, I would always imagine the person who made it, hologram-like, moving in front of it, shaping it according to reasons both personal and cultural. In that way, an art museum to me was a repository of many worlds.
Besides the visual history aspect of it, I also just enjoyed the aesthetics of things and focused a lot on form. As a kid, I had a habit of collecting stones or wood chips from the playground, just because they looked nice. I ended up amassing quite the collection. My interest in art and aesthetics thus began pretty young, and once I realized that aesthetic choices were not neutral but reflected priorities and values specific to a person, place, or culture, I was hooked.
By the time I was in high school, my interest in art history was pretty solidified, thanks to the influence of two wonderful art teachers. They would load us into school buses every few months and we would go to New York for the day. They would drop us off in the morning, either in Chelsea or on the steps of the Met, and would tell us to meet back at 5pm. In the interim, we were instructed to wander around, charting our own path through the Met or picking which of the many gallery doors in Chelsea to open. I think of these trips fondly and realize how formative they were because they helped me understand what I liked, and allowed me to develop a sense of discovery when it comes to art. They were also formative in that I was able to see, somewhat, what it might be like to work at one of those contemporary art galleries. Typically, the only gallery staff you’ll see are the gallery assistants sitting out front, so I decided that I wanted to be one of them one day. I didn’t have much of a plan beyond that, but I just knew I wanted to be in that atmosphere, close to artists and to the work they were making.
It must have been at the suggestion of one of my teachers, but I found myself researching the Elgin Marbles for a term paper. It felt like a door had opened somewhere in my brain. The more I read about this decades-long conflict — about the Greek government’s strenuous attempts to retrieve the marble statutes that the British has unceremoniously taken from the Acropolis, and the British government’s steady refusal to relinquish them — and the legal frameworks purportedly governing this conflict, I couldn’t seem to square these seemingly diametric fields. Turns out, they are a lot closer than one would think. I remember it being a pretty terribly written term paper but, for me, it was really my entry point into law.
“I’ve found that having a background in visual literacy, or a familiarity with art history, is useful for contemporary life. These days, we are constantly inundated with images. And a multiplicity of screens means more surface area for more images. Unlike writing, or other forms of communication, aesthetics can sometimes seem benign and comparatively neutral. I feel that my background in art has given me tools to evaluate these images in a detached way and understand aesthetic choices as intentional and inherently political.”
on attending a women’s college
I knew quite early on that I wanted to study art history because I was fascinated at the prospect of studying people and cultures through the lens of their material creations. I went to Wellesley College in Massachusetts. I spent four very precious years there, full of the growth that invariably happens at that age but in a nurturing and somewhat secluded environment. I really did feel that the all women’s environment created a sort of parallel universe, a place where female initiative and leadership was not just celebrated, but was the norm. It wasn’t perfect, but I would not replace that experience for anything.
on working at pace gallery
In my last year of college, I applied to several galleries and got an interview a few weeks before graduation. I started working a few days after I graduated, and felt very grateful that, at the time, I was exactly where I wanted to be. I spent a year as a gallery assistant and then five years as a sales assistant and artist liaison for one of the gallery directors. In that latter role, I assisted with all aspects of a primary or secondary market sale and artist management, whether that be artwork production, exhibition design, or institutional sales. I worked with a small group of digital artists at a time when digital or time-based media work was rather new to the market, so I got to learn so much and spend a lot of time with younger artists who were using technology in new and unexpected ways. It was a terrific job, and it allowed me to travel extensively for exhibitions and studio visits. It also enabled me to hone my logistical skills. I distinctly remember spending one holiday break at the gallery with my close friend and colleague as we catalogued each individual piece of equipment — amounting to hundreds of cables, computers, projectors, and endless strings of lights — for an upcoming shipment for a show in California. It wasn’t in the job description but it ended up being good experience nonetheless.
My favorite part of that job was working with artists and with so many like minded peers, many of whom are still my close friends. For a period of time, my entire professional and social life took place within the confines of those streets in Chelsea.
on deciding to change careers
There was not a single moment or turning point at which I decided to change careers. Ever since high school, I had known about and nursed my curiosity in the law, but it remained just that — a curiosity. At some point, however, I remember feeling so fulfilled at my job yet desperately feeling that I wanted to be back in school. It was tough to leave the arts because I felt I had come to know that world so well, but I was eager to learn about another. I always felt that the law operated like a cloud, an ever-present layer above about which I knew nothing and yet which shaped so much of the world. After several years at the gallery, I felt it was either time to try my hand at a smaller gallery or to shift gears altogether, and I chose the latter. I put in my notice during the summer and a few months later, I went back to school.
“At Pace, I had a wonderfully generous boss who told great stories and gave me the gift of trust and space, which enabled me to grow a lot in that role. He also had a practice of giving gifts — specifically, babka, purchased wholesale at a bakery in Brooklyn — every holiday season to our clients and artists. We always spent one day driving around the city dropping off babka to Claes Oldenburg, Kiki Smith, Robert Ryman, and others, while he would regale me with stories and lessons from his decades in the art world. I was so lucky that he let me into his world like that.”
on adjusting to law school
As anyone will tell you, the first year of law school is notoriously difficult. I struggled to adjust in the beginning, but I really grew to enjoy it once I found my footing. Everyone takes the same classes in their first year, such as criminal law, constitutional law, civil procedure, contracts, and torts. There was often zero overlap between law school and my prior job, so it was mind-bending at times to read and learn about topics that were so different from what I had been used to. In particular, the approach to writing was very different. Writing about art is much more discursive and free-flowing. Legal writing focuses on precision and clarity — you review your work with a fine-toothed comb, questioning the function and necessity of each word. This focus on economy in writing has really come to shape the way I write and think, and is something I really enjoyed learning at school and that I continue to practice in my current job. It’s much harder than it looks to synthesize complicated legal arguments into just a few paragraphs or sentences! But it’s an exercise in clear, effective communication, which is a skill that translates easily into everyday life.
on asian-american legal history
I took a seminar on Asian American legal history in law school. Asian American legal history is largely passed over in law school curriculums, but Asian American litigants were some of the earliest civil rights plaintiffs and were instrumental in securing rights that we all benefit from today. One of the most important litigants, in my opinion, was Mitsuye Endo, a Japanese-American woman living in Sacramento during WWII. When she was 22 years old, she and her family were interned. First they lived in horse stalls at a racetrack in Sacramento and later they were sent to concentration camps in California and Utah. Endo filed a lawsuit challenging the Roosevelt government’s internment program and won her case before the Supreme Court, which concluded that she had to be released. At one point, recognizing that Endo had a good case, the government tried to release her from the camp because this would prevent her case from reaching the Supreme Court. Despite wanting to leave, Endo refused and stayed incarcerated for years while her case wound its way up. In concluding that Endo was, in fact, a “loyal” citizen, the Supreme Court also acknowledged that the internment program was on shaky legal ground. However, the Court did not want to embarrass President Roosevelt, so it gave his administration a heads up and, the day before it released its decision in Endo’s case, the administration dissolved the entire internment program, which at that point was incarcerating about 80,000 Americans or residents of Japanese descent.
I wrote a paper about the case for my seminar, and it eventually became a published article. While working on this piece, I would get pretty emotional thinking of a young woman — younger than me, but who looked similar to me — deciding to stay in a camp, where her country had banished her, in order to pursue her lawsuit against the government and prove that she and the thousands of other internees had done nothing wrong. It was made worse by the fact that she was interned because she had been deemed “disloyal” just because she was of Japanese descent. These are not new sentiments, but it was sobering to learn how they had been weaponized during times of national strife. Since winning her case and effectively forcing the government to end internment, Endo has not historically received the same national recognition that male Japanese-American litigants have received, despite the fact that they all lost their cases in front of the Supreme Court — but in January, President Biden posthumously awarded her the Presidential Citizens Medal. There are of course stories like this in every field, so it was gratifying to be able to study and write about this one.
“Sometimes I see lawyering as a form of competitive storytelling. Being an advocate is all about being an effective and persuasive communicator. And like any form of communication, how one chooses to do that is an art. The laws and rules provide structure, and the exhibits and evidence are like props to tell the story. But in the end, law is about telling the better story — why this story is compelling, why you should compare it to other, equally compelling stories, and why this particular outcome or explanation makes the most sense. The best lawyers I’ve seen argue in court are those who will open with a broad narrative arc, fill in the details with individual characters and details, and then paint everything together into a cohesive story. I think one misconception people have about the law is that it can be dry or monotonous, but I find it quite the opposite.”
on working as a lawyer
My first job after law school was working as a law clerk for a federal appellate judge in New York. I feel incredibly lucky to have had that role, because it gave me a lot of insight into how the federal courts work and how judges make decisions. It also exposed me to many different areas of the law. As a law clerk, I helped my judge decide cases and drafted decisions and memoranda. An appellate court hears appeals from district court cases, in which one party will argue that the outcome of their trial or pre-trial proceedings was legally incorrect and the other party will argue that it was not. Because of this, the issues in the cases often required a lot of legal research and could sometimes feel academic. Much of my day was spent reading, writing, and discussing the arguments in a case with my judge and co-clerks. It felt like a constant dialogue, because we could take hours, days, or even weeks debating a particular issue. It was really intellectually engaging.
After a year, I joined a firm and worked on a months-long fraud trial out in San Francisco. It was the most intense professional experience I’ve had to date — the entire team moved out to California and we practically lived at the office for several months. Although the workload could feel like a firehose, we found ways to cope and connect. It was a real bonding experience. We ended up winning the case, but a series of events occurred thereafter that have dulled that victory somewhat. Nevertheless, I find myself thinking very fondly of that time and taking all the lessons I can from it.
I currently work as a law clerk for a federal district judge. I assist my judge with managing cases through pre-trial or trial proceedings, which are much more active than at the appellate level. Every day a new kind of issue arises and I am learning so much about the day to day practice of being a lawyer. I find it especially gratifying that, in this role, I have a lot more facetime with the parties — the people bringing (or defending against) a lawsuit. Meeting with the parties and their lawyers really demonstrates how much of an impact the court’s work has on everyday people, and how at the foundation of any lawsuit, underneath all the layers of laws and regulations, there is often a very simple, human drama at its core.
on her commute
My commute takes me through the grand hall of Grand Central Terminal every day, which I love. It feels very cinematic to walk through the organized throngs of commuters each morning. Everyone moves in a choreographed fashion, like streams of water around stones. It looks almost like a performance. And if you squint a bit at the overcoat-wearing, briefcase-carrying crowds, it can feel a bit like an older era of New York. I have a reverse commute, so after the bustling energy of the station, I board a comparatively quieter train and head to the courthouse. I usually spend the commute reading, either a novel, short stories, or briefs to prepare for the day. Right now it’s Tove Ditlevsen’s stories collection The Trouble with Happiness. I’ll also check for any updates that came in on my cases overnight. The train ride is around an hour and a half round trip, so I have a lot of reading time.
on her career advice
Stay focused and curious about what it is you want to do, but reevaluate that regularly and give yourself space to change your mind. It’s never too late to change your path, and in doing so, you’ll learn so much about yourself and explore new worlds that you might not have known existed. For those considering law, focus on your schoolwork as much as possible but be sure to have a guiding goal or principle in mind so you don’t get bogged down by the minutiae of the post-law school years.
on how leaving the art world helped her rediscover her love of art
Now that I don’t work in the industry anymore, I feel that my childhood interest in art has been restored in a way. Many of my friends are still in the art world, so I don’t feel too removed from it. I still love going to museums and galleries and try to see as many shows as I can, but now I feel that it comes from a place of pure interest rather than necessity or obligation. I like being able to choose how to participate in that world. It is interesting, however, to watch what happens in the art market from afar now that I have an understanding of how it functions, and even more interesting given my legal training.
“I expect this is probably true for most women, but as I get older I understand beauty to be the degree of proximity to oneself. Knowing yourself, choosing to chart your own path, and acting independently of outside pressures is what I find beautiful. Beauty, in other words, is confidence to make your own decisions. This idea has impacted the way I think about beauty and aesthetics in my own life. There is so much noise nowadays about how one should look or feel, so it’s been a relief to tune that out as I realize what I like and what works for me.”
on her style
I dress pretty simply and like oversized clothes, especially coats. In the summer, I’ll wear whatever allows me to bike, my preferred transportation in that season. In my professional life, there are still certain norms that govern the way women dress, but I actually enjoy that. It’s uniform dressing, at its core, and comes with all the benefits of that type of structure. I quite like wearing a suit for work — it can feel at times like armor, and helps me get into a certain headspace.
As for brands, I like Flore Flore, Studio Nicholson, Skall Studio, and Musinsa. I nearly always buy something while traveling. I picked up this striped shirt at Marimekko in Helsinki, and wearing it brings me back to the perfect few days I spent there this summer. I try to buy secondhand as much as I can. Club Vintage in the city and Mirth in Greenpoint are my favorite places to look for vintage Armani suits or evening jackets to wear to work.
on her beauty routine
I find that my mood and diet are at their best when I exercise, so I try to run or do pilates or yoga as often as I can. In the mornings, I splash my face with water and layer a toner, a ceramide-based serum from Dr. Jart+ or Krave and some drops of the Gold face oil from Monastery. I’m obsessed with Monastery products — they are all natural and smell divine. After that, I use Kiehl’s moisturizing lotion and Dr. Jart+’s Every Sun Day sunscreen. In the evening, I’ll double cleanse with DHC oil and a foaming cleanser, use a toner like Pyungkang Yul, use an AHA or other exfoliant, eye cream, and then the Monastery oil. In the winter, I’ll add either the Dr. Jart Ceramidin cream or Weleda Skin Food, the light version, and I also like the Sulwhasoo serum. I also do gua sha several times a week. For hair, I love using the Ceramonia Aceite de Moska oil several times a week, and always apply either Shu Uemera hair oil or the Mise en Scene Perfect Serum after showering.
on what she’s reading
Right now I’m reading the Tove Ditlevsen short stories and am about to start on Helen DeWitt’s novel, The Last Samurai. I loved her novella, The English Understand Wool — I found it absurd and hilarious. I’ve recently finished The MANIAC by Benjamin Labatut. It’s a fictionalized biography about John von Neumann, a mathematician and physicist who was a key figure in the nuclear age, but it’s written in such a way that you can’t quite tell what’s real and what’s imagined. Labatut’s ability to imbue fiction into seemingly empirical fact is something I find completely mind-bending. I loved his prior book, When We Cease to Understand the World. I also recently finished Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, and really enjoyed the way Erpenbeck explores themes of morality and abuse without sentimentality. It’s nominally about a love affair but it develops so inconspicuously and at one point becomes all consuming. Finally, Minor Detail by Adania Shibli is something I think everyone should read. It traces the throughline between a brutal attack on a Palestinian girl by Israeli troops in 1949 and a modern-day woman in the West Bank who learns of the story. It’s short but harrowing.
mina’s favorite spots in new york city
I love Winona’s or The Odeon for group dinners, and Minnows is where my friends and I convene most often for a drink. Lella Alimentari is my spot for lunch, or Eden’s in Brooklyn Safehouse. Paulie Gee’s, Broken Land, and Pencil Factory are Greenpoint classics — the patio of Pencil Factory in the summer is a fun scene. For cafés, I go to ACRE or Variety by McGolrick Park. McGolrick Park is my haven: it’s where I go with a book to unwind or just to sit and admire its tunnel of trees. For movies, I like Nitehawk Williamsburg, Metrograph, Syndicated, Film Forum, Anthology Film Archives, and the Quad Cinema.
The Noguchi Museum is probably my favorite museum in New York. I also like MoMA, The Met (especially on a quiet Friday or Saturday evening), Neue Galerie, and the Whitney. For galleries, I like 52 Walker, 303 Gallery, Canada, The Journal Gallery, Karma, The Drawing Center, and Klaus von Nichtssagend.
