National Gallery of Canada Parts Ways with Key Staff
The National Gallery of Canada has parted ways with its 22-year-veteran Indigenous curator, Greg Hill, and other senior staff.
Hill broke the news with an Instagram post Friday, saying he had been "declared surplus" that day, effective immediately.
"I want to put this out before it is spun into meaningless platitudes," he wrote. "The truth is, I'm being fired because I don't agree with and am deeply disturbed by the colonial and anti-Indigenous ways the Department of Indigenous Ways and Decolonization is being run."
The Globe and Mail is reporting that chief curator and deputy director Kitty Scott has been "laid off," along with Stephen Gritt, a longtime employee who directs conservation and technical research, and Denise Siele, hired recently as senior communications manager.
Angela Cassie
The newspaper quotes an internal memo to staff from interim director Angela Cassie: "The work-force changes are the result of numerous factors and were made to better align the gallery’s leadership team with the organization’s new strategic plan. … For privacy reasons, the gallery is not at liberty to discuss details of these departures."
The gallery has been without a director since the Sasha Suda departed in July to become director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She was just three years into a five-year appointment at the Ottawa gallery, where she led development of a strategic plan that "embraced reconciliation, justice, equity, diversity, inclusion and accessibility," in the words of Françoise Lyon, the chair of the National Gallery's board. The plan centralized Indigenous ways of knowing.
Cassie, formerly the gallery’s chief strategy and inclusion officer, has been interim director since Suda's departure. Cassie worked at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg before joining the Ottawa gallery last year.
Greg Hill Instagram post Nov 18, 2022
Hill, of Mohawk and French heritage, was the inaugural Audain senior curator of Indigenous art, a job that has been endowed by Vancouver art collector Michael Audain since 2007. Hill curated major exhibitions for leading Indigenous artists, including Norval Morrisseau, Carl Beam and Alex Janvier, as well as international survey shows, such as Àbadakone | Continuous Fire | Feu continuel.
The gallery established its department of Indigenous ways and decolonization in February, headed by Steven Loft, as vice-president, and Michelle LaVallee, as director, charging them with implementing the new strategic plan. Loft, of Mohawk and Jewish heritage, had been the director of strategic initiatives for Indigenous arts and culture at the Canada Council for the Arts. LaVallee, who has Anishinaabe and European roots, had been director of the federal government's Indigenous Art Centre in Gatineau, Que.
Kitty Scott (photo by Craig Boyko)
Scott, appointed in early 2020, is the first woman to hold the chief curator's position on a permanent basis. She has 25 years of museum and gallery experience, including her most recent post as a curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario. She was curator of contemporary art at the National Gallery from 2000 to 2006.
