Hilary Letwin
Dr. Hilary Letwin is a curator and cultural facilitator currently serving as Manager of Cultural Services at the City of Coquitlam. From 2018-2024, Hilary was the Assistant Curator and then Director/Curator of the West Vancouver Art Museum where she contributed immensely to the exploration and celebration of local arts, culture, and West Coast Modern architecture through exhibitions, publications, and talks. In 2022, she was instrumental in launching West Coast Modern Week, a week-long celebration of West Coast Modernism in West Vancouver, expanding on the Museum’s annual West Coast Modern Home Tour initiated in 2006 by her predecessors Darrin Morrison and Kiriko Watanabe.
Hilary received her PhD from The Johns Hopkins University in Art History in 2014. Since then, she has curated exhibitions at the West Vancouver Art Museum, the Burnaby Art Gallery, the Richmond Art Gallery, the Gordon Smith Gallery of Canadian Art, the Seymour Art Gallery, and has held curatorial fellowships at the Baltimore Museum of Art and the British Museum. Curatorial projects and publications have included The Eyes Have Walls: Nicole Ondre and Mina Totino, Saints, Sinners and Souvenirs: Italian Masterworks on Paper, Molly Lamb Bobak: Talk of the Town, Cornelia Hahn Oberlander: Genius Loci, A Modern Landscape: Takao Tanabe, Rabbit Lane: Douglas Coupland, A Twist of the Rules: The Architecture of Paul Merrick, Martha Sturdy: All Fall Down, The Decisive Moment: Ema Peter, The Bricktacular West Coast Modern Show: Paul Hetherington, Order from Chaos: Jane Adams and B.C. Binning, Losing Control of the Landscape: Ross Penhall, Home and Away: Ian Wallace, and A Refuge: Arthur Erickson in celebration of the famed architect’s centenary.
West Coast Modern Week debuted in 2022 under the curatorship of Dr. Hilary Letwin. Building off the success of the annual West Coast Modern Home Tour, then in its 16th year, Hilary undertook a community-building effort to bring together partners, including the West Coast Modern League, to create a program of talks, films, exhibitions, tours, and socials in celebration of West Coast Modern architecture in West Vancouver and the broader arts and design communities across the region.
