Wanda Nanibush leaves AGO amid Israel-Palestine controversy

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Wanda Nanibush (courtesy AGO)

Wanda Nanibush has left her job as Indigenous curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario amid a controversy involving public comments she made on the Israeli bombardment of Palestine, according to the online art news website Hyperallergic.

The website says the Toronto-based organization Israel Museum and Arts, Canada, complained in an Oct. 16 letter to the AGO that Nanibush was “posting inflammatory, inaccurate rants against Israel” on social media. Her subsequent departure from the AGO was deemed a “mutual” decision by the curator and the museum.

The Globe and Mail has presented a more nuanced version of events, saying Nanibush’s departure from the AGO came “following years of outspokenness that caused friction with some at the gallery and in the arts community — which came to a head with the current Israel-Hamas war.”

Stephan Jost, chief executive of the AGO, wrote to gallery staff last week about Nanibush’s candour, The Globe reports.

“One of the many things I always heard from Wanda was her honesty, which at times resulted in difficult conversations, including in the last few weeks,” Mr. Jost said in a memo obtained by The Globe. “She unswervingly inserted Indigenous art and artists, with grace, honesty and pride — which has changed our sense of history and our collective future at the museum.”

Nanibush is a prominent Anishinaabe curator who joined the AGO in 2016 as the inaugural curator of Indigenous Art and co-head of the Indigenous and Canadian Art Department. She recently won the Toronto Book Award for her co-authored book Moving the Museum and was a jurist for the 2023 Sobey Art Award.

She has publicly supported Palestinian causes in social media and in a 2016 feature for Canadian Art magazine, linking the experience of Indigenous peoples in Canada to that of Palestinians. “Colonization marks a before and after where identity is radically altered by loss,” she wrote.

The AGO has confirmed Nanibush’s departure but has not publicly provided a reason, noting only that Nanibush’s leave was a “mutual decision” and that the museum was “deeply grateful” to her. Nanibush declined to comment, citing the terms of her leave.

Candice Hopkins, a prominent Canadian Indigenous curator now working as executive director of the Indigenous-led Forge Project in New York’s Hudson Valley, told Hyperallergic she was “dismayed” by the news of Nanibush’s departure.

Hopkins noted that Nanibush has been a vocal critic of “the insidious nature of colonialism and the ongoing violences of settler colonialism.” 

“What her departure implies is that this is no longer a comfortable conversation for large institutions and that the work that many of us have been doing to create more just institutions is now no longer stable and safe,” Hopkins continued. “When topics like decolonization are rendered taboo, the future for Native voices in this field is bleak.”

The Globe said the signatories of the Oct. 16 letter from Israel Museums and Arts, Canada included Pearl Berman, executive director of the organization; and Sara Angel, a former long-time arts journalist who now runs the Art Canada Institute, a not-for-profit based at the University of Toronto’s Massey College.

In an e-mailed statement to the newspaper, Berman pointed out that the letter did not call for Nanibush to leave the gallery but said that it pushed for “substantive” antisemitism training and for the AGO to make use of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of anti-semitism.

Canada’s flagship art museums have attempted in recent years to give more prominence to Indigenous art and curators. But the experience has not been without difficulties. Amid disputes with management, Lucy Bell stepped down from the Royal British Columbia Museum and Archives in 2020 and Greg Hill lost his job at the National Gallery of Canada last November.

Sources: Hyperallergic and The Globe and Mail

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