Kate Taylor
They say a good king ensures his own succession, but two of the largest museums in the country are now caught awkwardly leaderless. The Royal Ontario Museum has just said goodbye to Janet Carding, the unlucky woman whose job it was to smooth out the many wrinkles that still remained after the institution's oversized building campaign in the 2000s. Meanwhile, the Art Gallery of Ontario, which handled its own renovation more smoothly, has bizarrely announced that, until it names a new director, it will replace the departing Matthew Teitelbaum with a council of six people, three senior staffers and three board members, who are expected to advise all senior staff. At least the ROM was able to turn to veteran museum executive Mark Engstrom, formerly its deputy director of collections and research, as a reliable interim leader. To whom exactly the AGO has turned remains the subject of some debate.
It was a great testament to Teitelbaum's board-charming skills that he stayed on long after the $300-million expansion designed by Frank Gehry opened in late 2008. More typically, board members weary of the person who keeps telling them a building project is over budget and behind schedule (as renovations so often are) and, once a new building is open, they decide it's time for a new leader. At age 65, William Thorsell left the ROM at the end of his contract in 2010, about two years after the museum had reinstalled its collection in the $300-million Michael Lee-Chin Crystal designed by Daniel Libeskind. That expansion had doubled in cost from conception to completion and opened almost a year late, while Teitelbaum kept the AGO's ship on a much tighter tack and was generously rewarded with bonuses for providing some clear, fast sailing.
He now departs, at age 59, to lead the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, but what he seems to have neglected is to prepare the next generation of AGO leadership. The museum has always hired art curators as its directors – Teitelbaum himself was senior curator for five years before he became director – but the current senior curatorial staff are relatively recent hires made during a period that has seen a high level of staff turnover.
There have also been a lot senior departures at the ROM – Carding was not popular with some staff who felt she emphasized audience engagement at the expense of research and curatorship – but happily Engstrom is still there to fill the gap. The ROM needs continuity as it struggles to raise the $33-million still owed on the Renaissance ROM project, and as it tries to adapt the less friendly aspects of Libeskind's architecture. Carding's stress on the relationship with the public and the relevance of the museum experience, a direction that the physical museum must take to survive in a virtual age, would have been the right one had there been a less awkward aftermath. As it was, having an outsider – Carding is a native of Britain who has spent much of her career in Australia – rather than a well-connected local who could keep schmoozing donors did not prove to be the right executive fit.
Talk in Toronto since both museums reopened in the late 2000s has always tended to a simple dichotomy: the AGO was a success; the ROM wasn't. But the AGO always has its own awkward issues left over from the great project. The current division of the museum into two halves, with the gift of art donated by the late Ken Thomson given pride of place at the front of the building while the permanent collection sits at the back, is one that was carefully negotiated and tactfully arranged by Teitelbaum. One major challenge for the next director is how to gradually build a more integrated institution – for example, bringing the Thomson Group of Seven holdings into contact with the AGO's – while maintaining good relations with the Thomson family.
All the talk is of a top-level international search, but bringing in a high-flying outsider of the kind who ran the gallery in the 1990s may prove disastrous. With the Luminato Festival also short one chief executive officer since Janice Price left late last year, there seems to be some lack of Canadian arts administrators ready to step up to the next level. Yet both the AGO and the ROM remain too close to once-in-a-lifetime renovations not to need guides who recall the history, understand the terrain and know the locals.
Kate Taylor