Stephan Jost sees only possibilities as he prepares for his first day as director of the AGO

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Stephan Jost cheerfully confesses he doesn't know anything about Canadian art and he's all right with that, Jack. In fact, it gets him "super-excited."

On first inspection, this seems a strange admission from a beamish, boyish-looking guy who, come next Monday morning, begins his new $350,000-a-year job as Michael and Sonja Koerner Director and CEO of the Art Gallery of Ontario. Founded 116 years ago in Toronto and now one of the largest cultural institutions in North America, the AGO has a permanent collection of almost 100,000 art works, a heckuva lot of them by (uh-huh) Canadians.

But there's method, so to speak, in Jost's apparent ignorance. Before coming to Toronto, Jost, 47, spent close to five years in Hawaii as director and CEO of the Honolulu Museum of Art, a.k.a. HoMA. Arriving there from yet another five-year tenure, this time as director of the Shelburne Museum in Vermont, Jost acknowledged he also "didn't know anything about Asian art," of which HoMA has an abundance. Jost's academic bona fides, in fact, are a bachelor of arts in 15th- and 16th-century Dutch and Flemish art from Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., plus an master of arts in 19th-century photographic history from the University of Texas, Austin.

And yet knowing nothing about Asian art also "was super-exciting" because, he said in an interview this week, "the institution of the museum is one of the few places where you can come and self-educate on your terms. 'Do you wanna know about African art?' We can help. One of the exciting things about being [at the AGO] is that, yeah, I know something about photography; I know something about Old Master prints and in three years I'm sure going to know something about Canadian art!" Avidity, it seems, is his middle name.

On March 30, barely three weeks after his last work day at HoMA, Jost was landing in Toronto with his husband of 10 years, Berkeley-educated historian Will Scott, and daughter, Monique, 5, in tow. In short order the family bought a "very vertical" semi-detached house in Little Italy, "got our drivers' licences and learned what OHIP is." The idea was "to put down roots as quickly as possible." Being within walking distance of the gallery was a big criterion: "We figured if we're going to live in Toronto, we're going to live urban."

The Ontario capital is not totally foreign to Jost (pronounced Yost – his parents are Swiss but immigrated in the 1960s to East Lansing, where his father is a professor at Michigan State University. As a result, Jost holds U.S. and Swiss citizenship). Scott was born in Toronto, lived here until 1988 and is a Canadian citizen. The couple married in Toronto and they've holidayed in Northern Ontario on several occasions.

So far it seems Jost's appointment has been met with

enthusiasm, or at least let's-wait-and-see acceptance. This is in contrast to the grousing that greeted the previous times the AGO chose a non-Canadian for its top job. New York-born Glenn Lowry succeeded Toronto-born William Withrow as director in 1990 (Withrow had held the job almost 30 years), serving until 1995 when he decamped to the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. Lowry's successor, Maxwell Anderson, also a native New Yorker, abruptly left in 1998, three years into a five-year contract, to head the Whitney Museum of American Art. Anderson was followed by a native son of Toronto, Matthew Teitelbaum, who ran the AGO for 17 expansionist years, overseeing the $276-million Transformation AGO refurbishment and expansion designed by Frank Gehry.

With previous international directorship searches, the AGO revealed the size and broad-stroke nationalities of the field of "nominees." Lowry, for instance, was one of 11 non-Canadians under consideration from a total pool of 36 candidates. However, for the search that eventually picked Jost, "the process was kept entirely confidential," an AGO spokesperson said. Still, it is known that Jost's name was not only on the search committee's list of candidates early on but that he also forwarded it to the AGO's attention shortly after Teitelbaum announced his leave-taking in April, 2015 (for Boston's Museum of Fine Arts). Jost said he and Scott were "very happy" living and working in Honolulu but, of course, they'd talk about what might be next. Toronto was one of five cities (the others were New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco) that made their list of future possibilities – "five cities in the position to define conversations."

By Jost's reckoning, the AGO directorship "is going to be open once every generation or maybe every 10 to 20 years. When I heard Matthew was going" – Jost calls Teitelbaum a "rock star in the art world" – "well, I couldn't just sit back.

"I can't point to a higher functioning city in North America [than Toronto]," he added. "In Asia, maybe there's Singapore and," he said with a laugh, "there's some trade-off they've done with civil liberties [to achieve that]."

Just before he left Oahu, Jost told an interviewer that it was his engagement with multicultural communities at HoMA that likely was "the primary reason" for winning the AGO directorship. Indeed, at HoMA, he introduced a $25 individual membership that increased membership by almost 65 per cent, expanded its education programs by strengthening ties to Hawaii's public-school system, organized art programs for more than 30,000 children and adults, and mounted popular exhibitions such as 2012's Tattoo Honolulu.

"That's the great challenge for every institution – reaching audiences, reaching changing audiences and reaching audiences that are changing, embracing multiple narratives and how you do that while maintaining a focus on mission," he said. The AGO is "incredibly lucky" to be located adjacent to one of North America's largest Chinatowns. It's a prod and a challenge and a reminder about what he calls "the Chinese conversation, this huge global shift of capital and power and cultural influence that's happening and has happened. We used to quip about our strategic plan at the Honolulu Museum, saying it's 'China, China, China, plus India.' That's the next 50 years. … The conversation we've got to include has to include contemporary Asia. You can't talk about a world-class contemporary art program and not talk about Shanghai, Beijing, Singapore."

With the completion of Transformation AGO in 2008, expectations were high the Toronto gallery could finally pass the one-million threshold in annual attendance. While it has yet to happen, Jost believes it's "doable," guessing it could take three years. "What would be really great is if we could hit that number and not have it be completely dependent on blockbusters," he said. "I think there's a danger of getting too focused on the admission number because otherwise you end up doing – well, the joke is 'Impressionist puppy dogs.' I do think our membership should be higher [in 2015-16 it was just more than 92,000]; I do think our attendance should be higher [about 790,000 in 2014-15] – but I worry about sacrificing thoughtful, intelligent programming just to drive that.

"Really," he said, "I'd rather have 750,000 people who love the institution, who see it as a part of their life." To that end, Jost tends to conceive of exhibitions in three broad categories – "shows that reaffirm your existing audience [an example being the upcoming Lawren Harris tribute, The Idea of North], exhibitions that bring in new audiences, and the nerdy show where you let the curator be as esoteric and intellectual as they want. The key is just don't mix them up. Don't think you can balance the budget with an esoteric show. It's not going to happen."

Another thing that's not going to happen? Jost curating exhibitions: "Maybe it'll be one [show] every five years," he said, noting how his contract with the AGO is open-ended rather than fixed in five-year increments. Meaning he could be gone in two years if he irks the board or around for 15 if he doesn't.

Certainly the board has to be pleased that Jost likes to describe himself as being "pretty fiscally uptight." But not so uptight that he's going to sweat the $367,000 deficit the AGO recorded in 2014-15 or the $1.6-million shortfall the year earlier (though in both years, the AGO notes they reported a balanced operating position). For an institution whose typical annual revenues have been between $61-million and $70-million, "it's pretty damn healthy," he declared.

In the meantime, Jost plans to spend much of the next couple of weeks holding one-on-one conversations with 50 AGO staffers from all ranks. What's working, what's not – he wants to know. "The person who sells our memberships knows our public better than anyone else, probably. And if morale is low among security out in the galleries, well, customer service is screwed, to my mind," he said. "If I get 10 little gems out of the process, I'll be happy."