Matthew Teitelbaum, AGO.Rosa Park for The Globe and Mail/The Globe and Mail
The scramble is on at the Art Gallery of Ontario to find a successor to long-time, high-profile director Matthew Teitelbaum.
In a surprise announcement on Thursday afternoon, the Toronto-based gallery, one of Canada's largest and most prestigious cultural institutions, said Mr. Teitelbaum would be leaving the AGO at the end of June to become director of Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, effective Aug. 3.
A Toronto native and the son of local painter Mashel Teitelbaum – who, before his death in 1985, would occasionally picket the AGO for not showing enough Toronto art – Mr. Teitelbaum, 59, has been a gallery stalwart for almost 22 years. Named its chief curator in May, 1993, he was appointed director/CEO in July, 1998, succeeding U.S.-born Maxwell Anderson, who decamped to Manhattan's Whitney Museum of American Art three years into a five-year contract.
In an interview with The Globe and Mail on Thursday, AGO chair Maxine Granovsky Gluskin said that Mr. Teitelbaum told her of his new job only two weeks ago and swore her to secrecy because it still had to be confirmed by the full MFA board. As a result, there are as yet no mechanisms in place to handle the transition to a post-Teitelbaum AGO – no interim director, no search committee, no outside headhunter and no timeline or date for confirming a full-time replacement.
"But these are early days," Ms. Granovsky Gluskin said. "Remember, Matthew's with us until the beginning of July, so this allows some time to put a transition plan in place. … The most important thing is we want to find the right person, the right fit."
In a brief telephone interview from Boston, Mr. Teitelbaum said it was the MFA that approached him earlier this year about taking the directorship. "If anybody thought I was looking for new challenges and thought it was anywhere other than the AGO, they were mistaken. What I was focused on was the strategic plan which the [AGO] board approved at its last meeting. That was all-engrossing. … I certainly wasn't talking to anybody until the MFA came to talk to me; I was not looking."
Mr. Teitelbaum's shoes will be big ones to fill. By many measures, his tenure as only the fifth director in the AGO's 115-year history has been highly successful. Six of the AGO's top 10 exhibitions in terms of attendance have occurred under his watch. The gallery's annual operating budget is now around $60-million and its permanent collection boasts more than 80,000 works. Most famously perhaps, he oversaw the completion in 2008 of Transformation AGO, a five-year, $300-million-plus expansion and refurbishment designed by superstar architect Frank Gehry that also included the donation of the fabled, eclectic collection of late Canadian billionaire art connoisseur Kenneth Thomson. For this achievement, the AGO board awarded Mr. Teitelbaum a much-discussed completion bonus of almost $665,000 in 2009. (His salary package for 2014 was just over $390,000, including taxable benefits.)
Mr. Teitelbaum is the most recent high-profile arts administrator in the city to leave his position this year: Janet Carding left after close to five years as director of the Royal Ontario Museum earlier this month to head the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery; Janice Price, founding CEO of the Luminato Festival in 2007, became CEO of the Banff Centre in February this year.
Ms. Granovsky Gluskin described Mr. Teitelbaum as "a great leader, so inspirational. … He's always had a bold vision for what he wanted the AGO to be and he's injected real energy and encouraged people who work at the organization to think big and boldly. The AGO is really buzzing now [and] he's put together a fantastic management team around him."
Richard Rhodes, editor of Canadian Art magazine, lauded Mr. Teitelbaum for the way "his curatorial experiences always fed into his directorial role . . . He was one of the sharpest directors I've ever met when it comes to knowing the world of contemporary art."
The "one soft spot" at the Teitelbaum AGO, Mr. Rhodes said, has been its relative lack of attention to local artists. "Most places in the world , you can walk into the local art gallery and after an hour you can come away with a pretty firm picture of the current generation of local artists. I'm not sure you can do that at the AGO."
It's highly likely the gallery's board will look internally for an interim director. Among the possible candidates are Stephanie Smith, the gallery's chief curator since August last year; Andrew Hunter, Canadian art curator since 2013 and Kate Subak, appointed chief business officer in July 2014.
Mr. Teitelbaum is filling big shoes, too. His predecessor, Malcolm Rogers, 67, headed the 145-year-old MFA for 20 years. During that time, he transformed it from struggling, deficit-plagued institution to arts powerhouse, with an annual average attendance of one million, many new galleries and a permanent collection of more than 400,000 artifacts. For this he was handsomely compensated, earning a reported $766,426 last year.
Mr. Teitelbaum said he is going to Boston – a city he knows well, since he was curator of the city's Institute of Contemporary Art from 1989 to 1993 – for the opportunity to work at an "encyclopedia museum … with a collection and staff … that connects to global issues in a way that I just find completely compelling – the notion of how to activate an Asian collection, how to activate an Indian collection, how to go deeper on early American art and help create a sense of identity through those works. It just seemed to be a set of ideas that were compelling for me at this moment."