National Gallery of Canada Suddenly Fires Four Senior Staff – ARTnews.com

The National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa has allow go of four senior staff members members, like its chief curator and its longtime Indigenous artwork curator, in an unanticipated go Friday evening that shocked Canada’s artwork group.

The information comes much less than 6 months right after the departure of Sasha Suda, who remaining her role as the institution’s chief operating officer and director in July to come to be the director of the Philadelphia Museum of Artwork in September.

A memo from interim director and CEO Angela Cassie mentioned a restructuring was the explanation for the departures of NGC deputy director and chief curator Kitty Scott director of conservation and technical study Stephen Gritt senior manager of communications Denise Siele as perfectly as Greg A. Hill, Audain senior curator of Indigenous Art.

“The workforce alterations are the final result of many factors and had been produced to much better align the Gallery’s management crew with the organization’s new strategic approach,” Cassie wrote. “For privacy motives, the Gallery is not at liberty to examine particulars concerning these departures.”

Hill, who labored at the NGC for 22 yrs and was the museum’s to start with Indigenous curator, said he was right away let go for significantly clearer motives. “I want to set this out there in advance of it is spun into meaningless platitudes,” he wrote on Instagram on Thursday. “The fact is, I’m currently being fired since I really don’t concur with and am deeply disturbed by the colonial and anti-Indigenous strategies the Department of Indigenous Means and Decolonization is getting run.”

In 2013, Hill co-curated the groundbreaking study exhibition “Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art,” with associate curator of Indigenous Artwork Christine Lalonde and visitor curator Candice Hopkins, who won the Independent Curator Worldwide Leo Award very last year. That exhibition brought alongside one another the get the job done of much more than 80 up to date Indigenous artists from the planet and was between the first in Canada to be opened with a land acknowledgement. In 2018, Hill was also an Indspire Award winner for the Arts.

Vancouver art collector and philanthropist Michael Audain, who experienced endowed the Indigenous curatorial career because 2007, advised the Globe and Mail in an email that the firing of Hill was “a great surprise.”

He continued, “I was underneath the effect that Greg had done a creditable job of introducing Indigenous artwork into the gallery, anything which was regrettably lacking when previous director Pierre Théberge originally requested me to endow Greg’s situation.”

Scott has extra than 27 several years of encounter in major artwork museums like the Artwork Gallery of Ontario in Toronto and the Serpentine Galleries in London. She also obtained one particular of Louise Bourgeois’s iconic spider sculptures that now sits at the front of the Countrywide Gallery of Canada’s entrance.

The National Gallery of Canada and its former staffers did not right away respond to ARTnews’s requests for further comment.