Fisher Collection Reimagined

For the 10th anniversary of the Fisher Collection coming to SFMOMA, a total reinstallation of the galleries was developed to foreground storytelling and visitor experience. 

For this project, I oversaw the design for the four floor project, leading a team of exhibition and graphic designers to complete a rehang of over 40% of the museum gallery spaces, which included nearly 250 works by 35 artists, across roughly 60,000 square feet. The scope of the project also included a brand new hands-on interactive space for all ages called the Co-Lab and a visual identity to encompass the project for promotion across print and digital channels.

To provide context and a conceptual framework for the collection, a series of exhibitions within an exhibition were conceived: Claes Oldenburg + Coosje van Bruggen: Thinking Big (Floor 3), Ways of Seeing: Fourteen Artists (Floor 4), Calder, Kelly, LeWitt: Fundamentals of Form (Floor 5), Memory and Matter: Personal and Collective Histories (Floor 6). In addition to the distinctive typographic treatments for each floor to introduce museum-goers to the themes of the exhibitions, our team developed new affordances to help the public make meaning from the art on view. This included new systems for displaying information, from object labels to wayfinding to storytelling stations with embedded audio and video.

This series of exhibitions also served as a testing ground for new inclusive design initiatives, including touch objects, tactile maps and accessible seating prototypes.

The work
Design began with collaboration across departments with curatorial, marketing, interpretation, education, visitor experience, construction and fabrication teams and included rough prototyping to test our concepts and design thinking workshops to activate non-designers. 

Success is being measured through focus groups, exit surveys, and visitor observation — an approach the project's leaders have compared to “running a science experiment.”

SFMOMA director Christopher Bedford called the reinstallation “a pilot for the whole museum.” The reinstallation was covered by The New York Times and profiled in SFMOMA's own editorial series.