SFMOMA NAMES JANET BISHOP CHIEF CURATOR
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA) announced today that it has promoted Janet Bishop, who has served as its curator of painting and sculpture since 2000, to chief curator. In her new role, Bishop will lead the curatorial division’s seventeen curators and associated staff and will oversee the implementation of SFMoMA’s new strategic plan as it relates to the museum’s exhibition and acquisition programs.
Over the course of her thirty-year career at the institution, Bishop has served as lead or co-curator for numerous exhibitions, including “Matisse/Diebenkorn” (2016–17); “The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant Garde” (2011–12), which was recognized by the Association of Art Museum Curators and the International Association of Art Critics; “75 Years of Looking Forward: The Anniversary Show” (2010–11), a major reinstallation of about four hundred works from SFMoMA’s collection; and “Robert Bechtle: A Retrospective” (2005–2006), the first comprehensive exhibition of the California realist’s paintings and drawings.
Bishop also oversaw SFMoMA’s On the Go program while the museum was closed for expansion from 2013 to 2016, securing locations for fifteen temporary collection-based exhibitions, site-specific installations, and educational initiatives in the Bay Area and beyond. She is currently preparing a career retrospective of artist David Park that will open at SFMoMA in the spring of 2020.
In addition, SFMoMA announced two other senior appointments. Chad Coerver was named chief education and community engagement officer, and Rebecca Malkin-Chocron was hired as the institution’s new director of finance, effective March 4. Coerver previously served as the museum’s chief content officer; director of publications, graphic design, and web; and managing editor. Malkin-Chocron comes to the museum from Niños de Guatemala, a nonprofit organization that runs three schools that serve over five underprivileged children in Guatemala, where she was a finance and operations adviser.
