Photo courtesy of Kim Khaira
Kim Khaira and Dr. Duaa Salah
Kim Khaira (right) with 2024 HOME emcee Dr. Duaa Salah at an event at Milwaukee City Hall
Growing up, Kim Khaira had always loved the outdoors and being in nature. She also aspired to be a professional artist. Since starting her career with Lynden Sculpture Garden in 2019, Khaira has been able to marry her lifelong passions while building bridges between Milwaukee’s many immigrant and refugee communities. She is the coordinator for Lynden’s HOME program, which engages with refugees and immigrants of Milwaukee by way of art, nature and culture. Khaira is assisted in her role by a steering committee that consists of individuals representing many different ethnicities, backgrounds and organizations.
“History is never just in the past,” Khaira emphasizes. “It’s in the present and is shaping the future as we go along.” This philosophy has been at the core of HOME’s programming, which has encompassed the Stories As We Move interview and conversation series, a multilingual story time series, panels on art and displacement, a monthly book club and more. HOME has also collaborated with other programs like the Tables Across Borders cooking series led by Kai Mishlove. Alongside Afghan activist Maryam Durani, Khaira also works with refugee teen girls as part of Lynden’s Be the Change program, where they teach leadership skills through the arts.
Born in Australia and raised in Malaysia, Khaira spent her childhood in the multicultural city of George Town, and having multi-ethnic heritage herself, she became fascinated by the movement, geography and history of the different peoples who call Malaysia home. “I always had a sense of questioning things from a very young age,” she reflects. “I’m interested in the way we look at others and how we relate to them. Ultimately, and in practice, it all boils down to caring for your neighbor, even in a small way.”
Despite her artistic ambitions, Khaira felt such a path was unattainable at the time and instead decided to study political science at International Islamic University of Malaysia, while minoring in English literature. College was where Khaira explored some of those previously mentioned fascinations with peoples and regions for the first time. “My introduction class put out the question of who gets what, where, when and how—and these were the questions I’d been wanting to piece together in a more structured way.”
Advocacy Work
After college, Khaira began her career with advocacy work around gender-based policy and human trafficking. She moved to Milwaukee in 2017 and now lives on the city’s South Side. Khaira had previously worked with Muslim Women’s Coalition as well as Hmong American Women’s Association as a domestic violence support advocate.
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Upon bringing her women’s support group to Lynden Sculpture Garden to an event featuring textile artist Arianne King Comer, Khaira learned the Southeast Asian dyeing technique batik for the first time. “Who knew that nine thousand miles away from where I grew up was where I could learn about my art form from my region and beyond,” she remarks. Khaira subsequently became an artist-in-residence at Lynden in 2019.
World Refugee Day is internationally observed on June 20. Khaira began spearheading Lynden’s annual celebration, building it into a massive all-day festivity of culture, food, art and performance between Milwaukee’s many refugee and immigrant communities. World Refugee Day remains an exciting annual staple at the Lynden grounds, with long-standing sponsors including the Wisconsin Department for Children and Families - Bureau of Refugee Programs and Hanan Relief Group
Arts Exploration
“We want the arts to be a form of exploration beyond just a one-off experience,” Khaira notes. “People in our community have shared with us that they see Lynden as a retreat and HOME as a reunion, where people from different communities and backgrounds who might normally not meet on a daily basis are able to engage with one another every year.
“We’ve also heard of people meeting and going off to collaborate and do their own thing together, which we are always happy about. We like to think of Lynden as a laboratory, which from the very beginning is Lynden’s executive director Polly Morris’ vision.”
After thousands of people showed up to that first World Refugee Day she coordinated with Rohingya community leader Hasina Begum, Khaira collaborated with Morris and the steering committee on developing Lynden’s HOME program, which would reshape how the organization specifically engages with refugees and immigrants on events throughout the year. Pandemic shutdowns resulted in HOME debuting virtually with an online platform and archive before transitioning to in-person events in 2021.
Outside of Lynden, Khaira has served on the board of local organizations like the Community Center For Immigrants and Black String Triage Ensemble
