Interim Director Angela Cassie to Leave National Gallery of Canada
Angela Cassie
Angela Cassie, the controversial interim director of the National Gallery of Canada, is leaving her job this month and will return to Winnipeg to take a "leadership position" there with another organization, says gallery spokesman Douglas Chow.
"Angela was looking for an opportunity to return home and will be moving back to Winnipeg, after a year of being in Ottawa, to start a new leadership position in Manitoba," Chow said in an email interview.
A new director is to be announced "soon" by the federal department of Canadian Heritage, he added.
Cassie had said herself in a brief interview some months ago she would be returning to Winnipeg in June but the assumption was she would continue to work for the gallery.
Before being named interim director, she had been the Winnipeg-based director of strategy and inclusion, a key post in sending the gallery down an often contentious path of decolonization and Indigenization.
That pathway, designed to make the gallery more inclusive in its hiring, collecting and programming, led to the forced departure of several senior staff, including chief curator Kitty Scott and Indigenous curator Greg Hill.
Cassie became interim director after the gallery's last director, Sasha Suda, left last summer to run the Philadelphia Museum of Art, three years into her five-year contract. The decolonization and Indigenization policies were initiated by Suda and continued by Cassie.
Meanwhile, the Globe and Mail is reporting a recent workplace survey released internally earlier this week shows low confidence in the gallery's management. Almost half of those who responded indicated they did not have confidence in senior managers "to lead the organization to achieve its stated goals and priorities."
