Milwaukee Art Museum names new photo curator

The Milwaukee Art Museum has announced the appointment of Lisa J. Sutcliffe as its new curator of photography. Sutcliffe will join the Museum in January. She is currently assistant curator in the department of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where she has worked since 2007.

Sutcliffe  recently organized the SFMOMA exhibition Naoya Hatakeyama: Natural Stories, in association with the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. In 2009, she organized The Provoke Era: Postwar Japanese Photography, the first survey of SFMOMA’s internationally renowned collection of Japanese photography, and Photography Now: China, Japan, Korea. Additionally, she served as assistant curator for Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective co-organized with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2012); and Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera Since 1870, with Tate Modern (2010).

Sutcliffe has organized film screenings, lectures and panels with internationally acclaimed artists at SFMOMA and other Bay Area institutions, and written about contemporary art and photography for diverse publications, and contributed to books for artists including Penelope Umbrico, Sean McFarland, and a forthcoming publication with Naoya Hatakeyama.

Before working at SFMoMA, Sutcliffe was the Koch Curatorial Fellow at the deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Lincoln, Mass. She holds an MA in the history of art from Boston University, where she specialized in the history of photography, and a BA in art history from Wellesley College.

Sutcliffe fills the position previously held by Lisa Hostetler, who left the Museum in July 2012 for the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. Sutcliffe will arrive as the museum plans anexpanded gallery presence for photography.