Matthew Teitelbaum is leaving to head Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.
In the wake of last week's announcement that Matthew Teitelbaum would be ending a 17-year stint as its director/CEO, the Art Gallery of Ontario on Friday morning took the unusual and unprecedented step of creating a six-member council to help run the gallery while it looks for Teitelbaum's successor.
The so-called "interim governing council" will be an amalgam of AGO trustees and staff, with Alicia Vandermeer, the gallery's chief organization officer/corporate secretary, and Robert Harding, vice-president of the AGO board of trustees, serving as co-chairs. The council is to begin its duties in late June, immediately following Teitelbaum's departure from the AGO and, after a one-month break, his assumption Aug. 3 of the directorship of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Also named to the IGC by AGO president Maxine Granovsky Gluskin following a hastily called meeting of the board were: AGO chief curator Stephanie Smith; AGO chief financial officer/director, information technology Rocco Saverino; AGO trustees Beth Horowitz and Michael Hasley.
Said Granovsky Gluskin in a statement: "I believe the IGC will provide essential guidance and support to the AGO's strong dedicated team during this interim period. With this structure in place, the gallery's forward momentum will continue, with all of us working collaboratively to ensure the AGO continues to be positioned for continued success."
Times always have been tumultuous at the AGO and Teitelbaum's almost 17-year stint as helmsman has been no exception, not least because much of that tenure was spent preparing for, overseeing and dealing with the consequences of Transformation AGO, at almost $305-million the most expensive and radical renovation/expansion in the gallery's 115-year history.
Yet what Teitelbaum, 59, conveyed through all the upheaval was a sense of stability, purpose and commitment – the kind perhaps only a native Torontonian who joined the AGO first as its chief curator in 1993 could have provided. Indeed, only another Torontonian has had a longer run in the gallery's upper echelons, namely William Withrow who ended an almost 30-year stay, 29 as director, in 1990.
It's unlikely the AGO's board of directors, which recently approved a strategic plan intended to shape the gallery's direction through 2018, hopes for or even expects that degree of investment from Teitelbaum's successor. At the same time, there's no doubt it's looking to avoid what could be called "the interregnum" between the Withrow and Teitelbaum epochs.
Those roughly eight years were split between two directors, Glenn Lowry and Maxwell Anderson. Both were New York natives, each with a PhD from Harvard. Each came to the AGO from either a mid-sized U.S. institution or a mid-level American curatorial posting: Lowry's arrival, in 1990 at age 36, was from the Sackler and Freer Galleries at Washington's Smithsonian Institution where he'd been a curator, Anderson's in 1995 at 39 from Atlanta's Michael C. Carlos Museum where he'd been director.
Both Lowry and Anderson were picked by the AGO after lengthy, wide-ranging and expensive searches. In Lowry's case the hunt went on for nine months and involved 37 candidates (25 Canadians, 12 non-Canadians), from which a short list of two Canadians and one non-Canadian (Lowry) was drawn. To secure Anderson, who succeeded Lowry, the search lasted six months, drawing 120 candidates. From these, a long list of 10, three of whom were Canadian, was assembled, then a short list of two non-Canadians and one Canadian.
When each was named as director by the AGO, there were yelps of protest. In Canada, that is. Were there no qualified Canadians, some asked. What's with the Ivy League white guy, said others. Howls were heard again when each decamped for plum jobs in the U.S. before each completed his contracted term: Lowry joined the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1995, where he's been director ever since; Anderson also took to Manhattan, becoming, in 1998, director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, a post he held until 2003. See, said the naysayers, this is what happens when you hire "Yankee carpetbaggers" with no nationalist sentiments to realize some vague longing for international standing! Long-time AGO trustee, benefactor and, from 1997 to 2002, president James Fleck didn't share the outrage. Still doesn't. "The Whitney and MoMA jobs – they don't come around all that often," he said recently. "Both institutions were more prestigious than the AGO" and had their respective directorships not opened up, Lowry and Anderson each might likely have stayed 10 years or so in Toronto. And instead of feeling used, Fleck said many AGO directors felt "we were being seen as pretty attractive place to be able to staff two major U.S. art institutions." It "burnished" the AGO's reputation, he said. "And we're an even more burnished gem today."
In the case of Anderson's departure, the AGO, fortunately, had been told by Anderson early in 1998 that the Whitney was scouting his services. By that time, it was felt the 42-year-old Teitelbaum was sufficiently seasoned to be considered for the top job, having spent five years as chief curator. The AGO therefore was able to quietly create what Fleck called "a search mechanism" to "update the extensive search that had taken place when Max was hired …, including external interviews and extensive interviews and discussion with Matthew." The result? The gallery announced Teitelbaum's ascension as director the same day Anderson officially resigned.
Notes Toronto artist and ex-AGO board member Joanne Tod: "I remember there was a feeling of rightness, that Matthew was the right person, the right choice. And why go though a long, expensive head-hunting?… My perception at the time was that the board was maybe tired of results that didn't pan out very well, that they'd gone for the stellar, the glamorous personality, and it was time to go more local."
Fleck thinks the hunt to replace Teitelbaum "will be an international search going after the best person." Previously, search committees were inclined to look for directors among the ranks of senior curators. But the AGOs of the world are now "big artistic businesses," he said, and curatorial strength is "no longer the only thing that's important."
Teitelbaum enjoyed and worked hard to gain the support of the AGO board, earning a $664,500 bonus in 2009 for his efforts on behalf of Transformation AGO. He also could be a superior schmoozer and fundraiser, a skill perhaps best demonstrated by his courtship of the Kenneth Thomson family to secure both art and money for the expanded gallery. In addition, he helped make the AGO friendlier, more convivial and popular in terms of exhibitions and its role as a social hub.
Canadian Art editor Richard Rhodes lauds Teitelbaum for the way "his curatorial experiences always fed into his directorial role." However, for Rhodes, the "one soft spot" of the Teitelbaum AGO was the relative lack of attention paid 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."
Another soft spot, according to some, has been in the realm of employee relations. Post-Transformation, the gallery has experienced a tremendous turnover in staff – a result not just of personal career shifts or the effects of the 2008-09 recession or the downs and ups in visitor attendance, but of Teitelbaum's management style, which some former employees characterized as mercurial, controlling, anxious.
A consequence of this churn, some say, is that at present there's no immediately obvious in-house staffer who can be considered a prime candidate to do the job full-time. While there is consensus that Teitelbaum is surrounded by a strong team – it includes Canadian art curator Andrew Hunter, 51, Smith, 44, U.S.-born chief business officer Kate Subak, 53, and modern and contemporary-art curator Kitty Scott, 51, also Canadian-born – none of these individuals has been at the gallery for more than three years.
Meanwhile, the AGO's search committee and whatever head-hunting firm it hires are facing a market in which there are "slightly more [openings] than usual" for director jobs, particularly in the U.S., "but nothing outside the norm." So says Christine Anagnos, executive director of the Association of Art Museum Directors. Institutions other than the AGO looking for new heads include the Brooklyn Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Baltimore Museum of Art. "Museums, like other sectors," notes Anagnos, "are going through a generational shift in leadership."