BYU Student Returns to Kazakhstan to Explore Heritage and Art
Kamila “Mimi” Stice, a studio art student at BYU, has spent her life navigating questions of identity and inheritance. Adopted from Kazakhstan at age two and raised in Provo, she said returning to her birthplace has been a recurring theme in her art.
“My work consistently returns to Kazakhstan,” Stice said. “It centers on inheritance, cultural heritage, lineage and fragmented memory. Art has become my way of understanding the complexities of adoption and constructing meaning from my fractured sense of identity.”
Stice, who works primarily in photography and sculpture, recently designed a 15-minute documentary film and received an Experiential Learning Grant from the Department of Art to travel back to Kazakhstan.
“It had been eight years since I had last been there,” she said. “Almost immediately, my plan began to unravel. Translators canceled, artists withdrew and appointments fell through.”
Despite the setbacks, Stice said she felt compelled to keep going. “I worried that I was wasting both my time and the resources entrusted to me,” she said. “But I had to continually revise my plans and get creative.”
She began contacting people through social media, reaching out to local artists and cultural historians. “I asked missionaries to assist with translation, extended my trip to the maximum my visa would allow and spent hours on Instagram and WhatsApp reaching out, getting rejected and finding new people I could interview,” she said.
Her persistence eventually led her to historian Julia Gani, who documents Central Asian visual history online. “To my surprise, she responded immediately,” Stice said. “Not only did she encourage me, but she also arranged interviews with six artists, personally scheduling the meetings and driving me around for the next three days.”
Those encounters, she said, reshaped her understanding of what her project was truly about.
“What were meant to be brief, thirty-minute interviews quickly expanded into something far greater,” she said. “Each conversation stretched into hours of reflection on art, history, childhood memories and personal lives.”
Through those experiences, Stice said she realized that her project had become more than documentation. “It was about something larger,” she said. “There are times when we are guided by our own intuition, and there are times when we find ourselves lost. In those moments, we are sent a guide.”
Stice said that through Gani, she was welcomed into a community of artists who treated her “not as an outsider observing them, but as someone returning home.”
“This trip was not only a way to reconnect with my past,” she said. “It became a pilgrimage and immersion into my living heritage.”
Two weeks after returning from Kazakhstan, Stice began the art department’s summer intensive, a seven-week program combining studio practice and travel. “Inspired by the idea of movement and land, I reflected on the nomadic traditions of Kazakhstan,” she said.
Her new body of work uses wool, hair and synthetic fibers to explore material inheritance. “Many Central Asian nomadic groups believe that felt retains the spirit of the animal because the wool is gathered without violence or death,” she said. “The fibers themselves bear witness to how the animal lived. I think this applies to human hair as well.”
Stice’s sculptures use wet-felting, braiding and wrapping to test how materials carry meaning. “I am exploring how memory and cultural practice become embedded in material,” she said. “Does using synthetic hair undermine the conceptual integrity of the work, or does it still hold power because it’s visually indistinguishable?”
She hopes her work invites reflection on what is passed down through blood, culture and experience. “At its core, it asks questions about nature versus nurture — what shapes who we become and what traces of our origins remain within us,” she said.
Her recent projects have also inspired a new venture: 99.9 Gallery, a student-run garage gallery she co-founded with fellow art students Marielle and Francisco. “We started 99.9 Gallery to provide opportunities for students and emerging artists to exhibit their work,” she said. “The artists at the summer intensive didn’t wait for permission — they created opportunities for themselves and their communities. I wanted to do the same here in Utah.”
So far, the gallery has hosted two shows, “End of Summer Show” and “Invocation,” featuring work by BYU and UVU students.
“It has been rewarding to see the positive response from peers and professors,” she said. “Before this project, we barely knew each other, and now we’ve learned together through every part of the process — gallery management, curation, collaboration and community outreach.”
