SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art announces the promotion of Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher to the Helen Hilton Raiser Curator of Architecture and Design and head of the Department of Architecture and Design. In her new role, Dunlop Fletcher will set the overall vision for the department, overseeing acquisitions, exhibitions and publications. She previously served the museum as assistant curator from 2008 to 2013, and as associate curator since 2013.
“We are grateful to Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher for her tremendous contributions to the museum,” said Neal Benezra, SFMOMA director. “I am certain she will continue to expand the Department of Architecture and Design when the new SFMOMA opens in spring 2016, with her breadth of knowledge, curatorial expertise and deep connections to our community of innovative designers.”
“At this pivotal time for the museum, we are thrilled Jennifer will take on this important role within our Architecture and Design department,” said Ruth Berson, SFMOMA deputy museum director of curatorial affairs. “Under her astute guidance, SFMOMA will be able to further share its outstanding holdings of Architecture and Design through major exhibitions, scholarship and collaborations with other institutions and artists.”
SFMOMA was the first museum on the West Coast to establish a curatorial department of Architecture and Design. In this department, Dunlop Fletcher has developed a curatorial approach to collecting and exhibiting design as it intersects with technology. She is additionally partaking in important collaborations with living designers as part of a major conservation-based research project, the Artist Initiative, funded by an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant. Supported by the initiative, Dunlop Fletcher and the Architecture and Design department are engaging leading Bay Area-based designers in order to investigate how to best build, maintain and interpret the museum’s design collection.
During her tenure at SFMOMA, Dunlop Fletcher executed several curatorial projects including the exhibitions Lebbeus Woods, Architect in 2013 (co-curator); A. Quincy Jones: Building for Better Living at the Hammer Museum in 2013; The Utopian Impulse: Buckminster Fuller and The Bay Area in 2012 as well as a commissioned work by filmmaker Mike Mills about Silicon Valley for the exhibition Project Los Altos: SFMOMA in the Bay Area in 2013. She has published significant essays on the practices of A. Quincy Jones, Ewan Gibbs, Tobias Wong and Lebbeus Woods. Since 2010, she has been building SFMOMA’s Architecture and Design collection with an emphasis on experimental works of design since 1980. Recent acquisitions include seminal works by Neri Oxman, Ant Farm, Neil Denari, Nathalie du Pasquier, Iwan Baan, Nacho Carbonell and Mathieu Lehanneur.
Dunlop Fletcher holds a bachelor’s degree in Art History from New York University, a master’s degree in Curatorial Studies of Contemporary Art from Bard College and a master’s degree in Architecture History and Theory from Harvard University.
Promotion of Joseph Becker
SFMOMA additionally announces the promotion of Joseph Becker to associate curator of Architecture and Design, after serving the museum as assistant curator since 2008. Becker has contributed to several of the museum’s Architecture and Design exhibitions and acquisitions. He was curator of Field Conditions (2012) and Parra: Weirded Out (2012) as well as co-curator with Dunlop Fletcher of Lebbeus Woods, Architect (2013) and co-curator of ParaDesign (2011) with Henry Urbach and Dunlop Fletcher. He has been an active member of numerous design panels and has served as a juror for several significant national architecture programs. In addition to his curatorial role, Becker has led workshops on exhibition and experiential design, and has lectured internationally. Becker holds a bachelor’s degree in Architecture and a master’s degree in Advanced Architectural Design in Design Theory and Critical Practice from the California College of the Arts.
