Winner, AIGA Award "Best Environmental Exhibition Design"
Finalist, Createurs Award "Best Exhibition Design"

“Conversation Pieces: Contemporary Furniture in Dialogue,” San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) 2022-2023.

A collection-based exhibition co-created and designed by our studio. Forty-five works of furniture from SFMOMA’s Architecture + Design collection prompting multiple threads of conversation within an immersive setting. The exhibition enjoyed wide popularity and critical success.

In keeping with SFMoMA's mission to recognize thought-provoking critical works of architecture and design, the works on view are sometimes extreme, often bold, and always conversation starters. A series of satellite dialogues with the designers allowed conversations to engage design enthusiasts during the run of the show.

Loew's work at SFMOMA has been shaped by her experience building collections of historical furniture and decorative arts for an international clientele. SFMOMA's Curator of Architecture and Design, Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher, selected Loew to co-organize the exhibition on the strength of her scholarship and studio practice. Loew's ethos is rooted in her doctoral research on Creative Director Barbara D'Arcy — research that examines how D'Arcy transformed Bloomingdale's flagship store into an international destination through "model rooms" that cultivated a following not unlike that of the modern-day art and design fair. Through this work, Loew challenges the modernist dogma that decoration is subordinate to architecture, asserting instead that interior design is a space of cultural participation, experimentation, and dynamic change.

The exhibition is a dimly lit, richly colored carpeted landscape with benches for visitors to sit at eye-level with the works, which share an interest in disrupting status-quo and consumer-driven notions of good taste, to incite more artist-driven conversations delving into the decorative arts, history, and ecology in design culture. Visitors to the gallery listen in on recorded conversations between six furniture designers—Stephen Burks, Dozie Kanu, Fernando Laposse, Jay Sae Jung Oh, Lilliana Ovalle, and Bethan Laura Woods. Additional featured designers include Germane Barnes and Kwangho Lee, and many of these designers trace their practices to and whose work is in dialogue with more established designers from the Museum's collection, such as Gaetano Pesce, Natalie du Pasquier, and Isamu Noguchi.