The Art Gallery of Ontario announced today the appointment of Stephan Jost as its new director. The Michigan-born Jost, who has a young daughter with his Toronto-born husband, has led the peripatetic life of upper-level arts administrators, having worked at institutions in Ohio, California, Vermont and most recently at the Honolulu Museum of Art.
Jost helped boost attendance and membership in diverse Hawaii, an expertise that Toronto needs. The 47-year-old’s initiatives in Honolulu included, for example, an exhibit of local tattoo artists and photos of people sporting their work.
Jost replaces Matthew Teitelbaum, who left for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston last summer. While at the AGO, Teitelbaum, in addition to overseeing the Frank Gehry-designed expansion of the AGO’s building, refused to cut his nearly half-million-dollar salary during the 2008-10 recession, when staff were facing layoffs and museum directors elsewhere took salary cuts to help keep their institutions afloat.
Under Teitelbaum’s watch, admission to the gallery, its special exhibits and programs like the monthly First Thursdays party – even taking into account its free Wednesday afternoons – remains on the high side. The Brooklyn Museum, for instance, opens its doors for free at its monthly party evening, as well as providing a free shuttle bus from Bed-Stuy.
The AGO does good work with First Nations artists, curators and communities, but it could have done more to reach out to local artists of colour and members of the black community in conjunction with the last year’s Basquiat show. Contrast the colonial/ruling-class perspective of the AGO’s Maharaja: The Splendour Of India’s Royal Courts, which came from the Victoria and Albert Museum and prominently featured a maharaja’s Rolls Royce, with the Art Gallery of Mississauga’s effort to speak to the South Asian community with a retrospective of the Sahmat Collective, a radical contemporary Indian anti-sectarian group.
Let’s hope Jost’s emphasis on education programs in Hawaii has an influence on the AGO’s strategies of displaying its permanent collection. The museum could provide a lot more background and context to fill in some of blanks in its spotty collection, get first-rank works out of storage and make more obscure second-string artworks easier to appreciate.
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