Stephan Jost will step down from his position because the director and chief government of the Artwork Gallery of Ontario (AGO), the foremost artwork establishment in Toronto, on the finish of the present 12 months. He has led the gallery since 2016 and has prioritised reaching youthful and extra various audiences throughout this tenure. A majority of gallery-goers are actually beneath age 39 (with out even factoring at school teams) and round 60% report having non-European heritage. These numbers more and more mirror town at massive, which is statistically one of the crucial various on the planet.
“Over the summer time, I mirrored on arriving on the AGO ten years in the past and establishing the strategic plan we name AGO 2028,” Jost mentioned in an announcement. “I realised that we now have met our objectives forward of schedule. Now’s the time to set the AGO up for the longer term with new management.”
The gallery’s everlasting assortment has elevated dramatically throughout Jost’s decade of management, with greater than 18,000 works being accessioned. That features the high-profile donation of 450 items from late patrons Carol and Morton Rapp, 37 works from the property of late telecoms government Philip B. Lind, the three,500-piece Montgomery Assortment of Caribbean Pictures, and important our bodies of labor by particular person artists together with 450 items by Diane Arbus, 227 works by Hiroshi Sugimoto, 200 works by Peter Hujar and a set of 170 works by Käthe Kollwitz.
Jost additionally helped launch a C$100m ($73.4m) constructing mission that can see the AGO add 40,000 sq. ft of exhibition area, dubbed the Dani Reiss Fashionable and Modern Gallery, which is scheduled to open subsequent 12 months.
It has not been all been easy crusing for Jost. A dispute over final 12 months’s deliberate acquisition of a piece by Nan Goldin, which was finally not acquired, led to the resignation of a curator and two acquisition committee members. The gallery was additionally closed for greater than a month within the spring of 2024 after contract negotiations with a union representing greater than 400 employees broke down, resulting in a protracted strike. And in 2023, the departure of the gallery’s extremely revered Indigenous artwork curator Wanda Nanibush sparked public outcry and the resignation of one other curator.
After an eventful decade in Toronto, Jost will take what’s he’s calling “a little bit of a break”, which can stretch for the higher a part of a 12 months, earlier than on the lookout for a management position elsewhere. “Let me be blunt,” he says, “there’s no scarcity of alternatives for main museum administrators.”
Previous to his time in Toronto, the Michigan-born Jost held management roles on the Honolulu Museum of Artwork, the Mills School Artwork Museum in California and the Shelburne Museum in Vermont, amongst others.
The AGO will probably be appointing an interim director when Jost elements on 31 December and embark on a worldwide seek for his successor.
