Alexandra Suda to direct National Gallery
AGO curator has been a rising star in world of arts museum administration
When Alexandra Suda takes up her post as the director and CEO of the National Gallery of Canada in April, it will be a striking promotion.
“I’m blazing trails, I think. I see that in some way,” Suda, the Art Gallery of Ontario’s 38-year-old curator of European art, told this newspaper Wednesday.
Suda is to begin a five-year term heading the National Gallery on April 19. She will be the fourth woman to lead Canada’s top art museum.
Suda succeeds Marc Mayer, who was the National Gallery’s 10th director and who left the position in mid-January after 10 years. Before coming to the National Gallery at the age of 52, Mayer had been the director of the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, and the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto, as well as deputy director at the Brooklyn Museum in New York City.
Although Suda has no directorial experience, Mayer expressed his confidence in her Wednesday when he tweeted: “Good news. Alexandra ‘Sasha’ Suda named new NGC Director and CEO. I can breathe again. And even smile! She’ll be great.”
“We are honoured and pleased to have Dr. Suda lead our team,” said Françoise Lyon, chair of the National Gallery’s board of trustees.
“She is not only an internationally recognized curator who has organized award-winning exhibitions with record-breaking attendance, but she is also an engaging and inspirational leader and team builder who has collaborated with collectors, curators and other museum stakeholders throughout her career,” continued Lyon.
In 2016, Suda was chosen to participate in the Governor General’s Leadership Conference, which brings together Canada’s future leaders.
Suda said that passion and curiosity have sparked her drive to advance as a museum administrator, and that she intends to let her passion for advocating for art shine through.
“I’ve always felt from the early days, there’s an urgency to the need for art. It’s not a ‘nice to have.’ It’s a ‘need to have,’” she said.
“What’s good for art is good for Canada and for the world.”
Among her more matter-of-fact priorities, she said, will be hiring to fill two high-level positions at the National Gallery, those of chief curator and the head of the Canadian Photography Institute, which have had interim managers in place since departures last spring.
Suda, who in AGO materials is more often referred to as Sasha, was born in Orillia and raised in Toronto. After high school, she was educated in the United States, and holds a PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.
Suda’s first museum job was in the medieval department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
She joined the AGO in 2011 as its assistant curator of European art, and was promoted several times to become the museum’s curator of European art and R. Fraser Elliott Chair, Print & Drawing Council.
Suda said that while the focus of her career has been European art, she will bring “no kind of European agenda” to her new position.
In 2009, when Mayer, a Franco-Ontarian originally from Sudbury, took over as the director, he inherited an institution that was in turmoil due to high-level staffing squabbles.
Last month, in an exit interview with this newspaper, Mayer spoke of his accomplishments, including bolstering the status of Indigenous art, Canadian contemporary art and photography at the National Gallery, overseeing extensive renovations to the building, and expanding the National Gallery’s global reach for contemporary art.
Mayer’s tenure was marked in its final year by the National Gallery’s aborted attempt to sell its Marc Chagall painting La Tour Eiffel to fund another acquisition.
Also, a February 2018 confidential internal survey of National Gallery employees found that not even one in five felt that senior management made effective and timely decisions.
I’ve always felt from the early days, there’s an urgency to the need for art. It’s not a ‘nice to have.’ It’s a ‘need to have.’