Yesterday, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) named Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher as the Helen Hilton Raiser Curator and head of the Department of Architecture and Design. In her new role, she will be overseeing the department’s acquisitions, exhibitions, and publications.
Dunlop Fletcher joined SFMOMA as an assistant curator in 2008, and was promoted as an associate curator in 2013. Within these roles she developed an approach of collecting and showcasing design with an emphasis on technology. She helped execute exhibitions such as Lebbeus Woods, Architect in 2013; A. Quincy Jones: Building for Better Living at Los Angeles' Hammer Museum in 2013; and The Utopian Impulse: Buckminster Fuller and The Bay Area in 2012. She also commissioned work by filmmaker Mike Mills about Silicon Valley for the exhibition Project Los Altos: SFMOMA in the Bay Area in 2013.
Since 2010, she has also been building on the Department of Architecture and Design’s collection by accumulating pieces with an emphasis on experimentation dating back to 1980.
Currently, she is leading the Artist Initiative, a major research project focusing on conservation, which receives funding from an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant. The program involves the Bay Area's leading designers collectively investigating how to build, maintain, and interpret the museum’s design collection.
SFMOMA, which was founded in 1935 and considered the first institution on the West Coast dedicated to modern and contemporary art, boasts the first curatorial department of Architecture and Design in the same area. Currently, the museum is not open because it is undergoing an expansion lead by Scandinavian firm Snøhetta, which is slated for completion by 2016, to accommodate the institution’s exceptionally large permanent collection.
