Who can make change? Staff @ NGC
Perhaps more than many other galleries, the leadership at the National Gallery of Canada plays an important role in shaping museum programming. When I interviewed curators around the country in 2014, ie before Sasha Suda became Director, many former NGC employees made clear that the Gallery’s previous Directors really steered the ship, and that getting any show supported was a major accomplishment. So they knew they had to appeal to the Director’s tastes, or they would just not get the floor space. It’s unclear whether the new regime will be any different in terms of curatorial autonomy, but they have signalled that they are planning a massive shift. So who makes these decisions, where does the power lie?
For most of this past decade, Marc Mayer was the NGC Director and CEO. He left the Gallery in 2019 after having completed two five-year terms as Director. Given the tumult of the years preceding Mayer, (including lawsuits and strike votes), he stepped into a challenging position. In many ways, even with significant position cuts, his tenure seemed relatively successful, from the outside. During Mayer’s time, the Gallery shifted markedly toward the contemporary, which is true of most galleries by this time. It continued to improve its record of representation of Indigenous art, which was a pressing concern. However, things began to unravel by 2018. Reports of significant staff dissatisfaction with senior leadership compounded problems stemming from the public outcry against Mayer’s plan to deaccession a Chagall painting to support another acquisition. It seems like the latter issue was the tipping point. I would love to know if things like the major protest in 2010 around the lack of diversity at the Gallery had much internal impact; but given the gallery’s record in terms of representing artists of color (other than Indigenous) during Mayer’s time, I don’t really think this issue was considered significant. That this lamentable record was consistent with his record at MACM, means it should have come as no surprise, and perhaps it didn’t to the real powers behind this scene — the Board. I wonder too if staff dissatisfaction matters much to museum Boards. The deaccessioning scandal, however, was something that he just couldn’t get out from under.
One wonders too how much the change in leadership of the museum Board affected things. In 2017, Françoise E. Lyon, who is noted for ger activism, became Board Chair. As a founding member of the Women of Influence circle at the MMFA, Lyon has a demonstrated interest in more equitable representation. And in the search for a new Director/CEO it was reported that she “wanted a disrupter in the director’s office, ‘to influence how future museums will look’”.
Sasha Suda assumed the role in April 2019. She seems the opposite of Mayer in many ways. A medievalist by training, she came from the AGO, where she had been Curator of European art. Her most noted exhibition there was Small Wonders: Gothic Boxwood Miniatures. It seemed safe to assume that she would shift the direction taken by Mayer, who had been so strongly interested in contemporary art. That this would be towards a more progressive stance with respect to Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion is a pleasant surprise.
The Deputy Director and Chief Curator also seems poised to make change. Under Mayer, the position had been held by Paul Lang, who took over from David Franklin, both of whom specialized in historic European painting. Lang’s departure in 2018 opened the door for the return to the gallery of Kitty Scott, who had been the NGC’s Curator of Contemporary Art from 2000-2006, and made a lasting mark on the Ottawa landscape by installing Louise Bourgeois’s Maman outside the gallery. After her first time at the Gallery, Scott was unusually frank about the challenges an NGC curator faced in the early 2000s. In interviews, she made clear that the then-curatorial structure was heavily slanted toward the tastes of the Director (Pierre Théberge at the time, although rumors of this kind of top-down management persisted under Mayer). Her return suggests that things may have changed. Scott is the first female Chief Curator at the NGC.
Reporting to the Chief Curator are 6 Senior Curatorial positions. Canadian and International contemporary art is headed by long-time NGC employee Josée Drouin-Brisebois, Senior Curator of Contemporary Art since 2007. Contemporary art also fits into the portfolio of Greg Hill in his role as Audain Senior Curator of Indigenous Art, a position he’s also held since 2007. This linguistic overlap -- contemporary art and Indigenous contemporary art -- speaks to the challenges of organizational clarity. The photography area, which also works with living artists (this website’s definition of contemporary, if not the NGC’s) has just been taken over by long-time NGC employee Andrea Kunard, after Ann Thomas’s retirement from that role. But with Scott, Drouin-Brisebois, Hill and Kunard all interested in contemporary, I think this area is really poised for renewal.
In other areas, Katerina Atanassova has been Senior Curator of Canadian Art since 2014. She replaced the iconic Charles C. Hill, who had been Curator of Canadian art since 1980, and literally wrote the book on Canadian art. Prior to arriving at the NGC, Atanassova was Director of Exhibitions and Chief Curator at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, with strong interests in what seems to be a pretty traditional version of historic Canadian painting. The Senior Curator of Prints and Drawings is Sonia Del Re, and the position in charge of European, American and Asian art is currently vacant.
The curatorial stream at the NGC is not the only position with power in determining the exhibitions. Parallel to the Deputy Director (Collection and Research) is the position of Deputy Director, Exhibitions and Outreach. The position is currently split position: Gary Goodacre is the Interim Co-Deputy Director, Exhibitions and Outreach, and Chief, Education and Public Programs; and Ivan Parisien, is Interim Co-Deputy Director, Exhibitions and Outreach, and Chief, Publications and Copyright. The role of these figures in leadership is invisible to the public, but reportedly very important at the NGC and other large institutions, where the gate value of exhibitions plays a significant role. I’d love to see some analysis of the role played by positions such as these in determining programming.
