Jill Sterrett , Emeritus Board Member

Jill Sterrett is an independent arts and cultural heritage advisor, working currently on Toward Common Cause: Art Social Practice and the MacArthur Fellows Program at 40, a city-wide project opening in Chicago later this year. She was Interim Director and Deputy Director at the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago from 2018-2020. She was Director of Collections and an art conservator at the San Francisco Museum of Art from 1990-2018. She has also practiced conservation at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Library of Congress, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the National Library of Australia and the National Gallery of Victoria. Jill’s work focuses on the role of museums in contemporary society, operating at the intersection of collections, conservation, and memory. She believes this business of objects has always been about people—that our values emanate from what we make, keep and care for. Jill is particularly well-versed in artistic practice from the 1950s to the present, in particular artists such as Eva Hesse, Robert Rauschenberg, Doris Salcedo. Jill is a graduate of Denison University with a B.A. in Chemistry and a B.A. in Art History. She earned her M.A. in Art Conservation from the Cooperstown Graduate Program. She has published and taught on the subject of museums, conservation and contemporary art, including as a Fulbright scholar in Portugal. Jill was the VoCA Board President from 2014-2020.