Stephan Jost, who has been director and CEO of the Art Gallery of Ontario for 10 years, is pictured at the gallery in April, 2016.Fred Lum/JOBFlocks
If you can discount tariff talk for a minute, the surprise news in the cultural community is that Stephan Jost is leaving the Art Gallery of Ontario in December, before the opening of a big addition to the Dundas Street building that he had initiated. Jost has led the Toronto institution as director and CEO for a decade, a standard run for gallery executives, but his signature project, the 40,000-square-foot Dani Reiss Modern and Contemporary Gallery, is only set to open next year.
Jost may be present at the ribbon cutting but he won’t be leading the AGO anymore, the gallery announced last week. He figures it is better for a new leader to assume the role before the opening to carry the new space forward with momentum, and he wants a break from what he called in an interview “no-win conversations.” Belatedly, the difficult politics of the museum sector, which is increasingly divided between social activists and traditionalists, seem to have caught up with him.
Perhaps somebody had to pay for the Nan Goldin fiasco that in 2025 saw the AGO back away from a proposed acquisition by the artist and pro-Palestinian activist under pressure from donor Judy Schulich. The overreach by the acquisition committee on which Schulich sat led to the resignation of John Zeppetelli, the curator who had championed the purchase of a Goldin video work (unrelated to her politics) – and a lot of public embarrassment when the story got out early this year. Jost’s number two, chief curator Julian Cox, already left the gallery in April.
This was the second time Jost had lost a prized curator to what appears to be politically motivated interference: Indigenous curator Wanda Nanibush, also vocally pro-Palestinian, left in November, 2024. The gallery, apparently unable to square her institutional status with her social media posts, suggested to staff in a memo that her departure was a mutual decision and praised her honesty. However, that departure has been devastating to the AGO’s reconciliation ambitions, splitting up the Canadian-Indigenous curatorial partnership that Nanibush had established with curator Georgiana Uhlyarik. Currently, the gallery has neither an Indigenous curator nor an Inuit one.
Jost has been a popularizer at the AGO, and often successfully so. Perhaps his best legacy is the free pass for anyone under 25, instituted in 2019. The gallery is full of younger visitors from all backgrounds. Some of the programming that draws people is both crowd-pleasing and intelligent. For example, the 2018 Yayoi Kusama show, for which crowds literally lined up around the block, wasn’t just a chance to step inside one of the Japanese artist’s mirrored infinity rooms. It was also an in-depth look at her pioneering art of the 1960s and 1970s, and the relationship between her work and her mental health.
On the other hand, some programming only looks like an attempt to keep the turnstiles spinning. The 2022-23 Leonard Cohen show used the famous name to front an unlikely archival exercise that didn’t have much to say about his actual music. However, it was certainly a step up from this summer’s Eyes of the Storm, merely a visual tribute to the Beatles’ early years featuring enlargements of Paul McCartney’s photographs.
It was not easy keeping a public art gallery going during the pandemic – AGO donors and the federal wage subsidy helped to cover payroll while staff took a 25-per-cent pay cut during the 2020-21 closures – nor recovering from the loss of visitors once it reopened. But Jost’s popular programming has not always sat well with his curators and in recent years the curatorial department seems to have installed a revolving door. Taqralik Partridge, an associate curator focusing on Inuit art, lasted about 14 months from 2022-2024; Xiaoyu Weng, a high-profile Chinese curator appointed from the United States in 2021, served about two years as a contemporary curator.
Of course, the role of the director is not just to attract more people but also different people. In that regard, Jost’s tenure does have one big curatorial win: the creation of the Global Africa and the Diaspora department where curator Julie Crooks has mounted several compelling exhibitions about Black culture as well as overseeing the acquisition of a major collection of historic Caribbean photography. If shows such as the multidisciplinary Leonard Cohen exhibit seemed an awkward move beyond pure visual art, her social documentary approach to her material has worked well – next up is Sunday Best: The Power and Glory of Black Style.
A rendering of the AGO's expansion project, which will see the addition of 13 new galleries across five floors.Rendering by Play-Time, courtesy of Art Gallery of Ontario, Diamond Schmitt, Selldorf Architects and Two Row
The photography department under Sophie Hackett has also programmed strongly, including the 2020 Diane Arbus retrospective and a clever daisy-chain show that celebrated the department’s 25th anniversary by asking local figures to pick works from the photography collection, each enthusiast’s choice inspired by the one of the person before. Meanwhile ambitious survey exhibitions with inventive themes – Making Her Mark, a show of historic female creativity in 2024, and 2022’s I am Here, a photography and home movie exhibition that juxtaposed professional and amateur work – prove the curators who have stayed are still at the top of their game.
If Jost has been a popularizer, he has also been an expansionist. The collection has grown by 18,000 items during his tenure and the Reiss Gallery – named for a $35-million gift from the Canada Goose CEO – will add 13 new galleries in a five-storey tower squeezed in to the south-east corner of the existing building, above the loading docks. The space will cost at least $100-million and some museum planners may have advocated a satellite instead: A basic building in an under-served new neighbourhood such as the West Don Lands might have got the AGO more bang for the buck.
Meanwhile, the architectural community is not convinced by the mishmash on Dundas Street: This is the third major addition to the site since the 1990s. The Reiss Gallery is connected to the existing building in four locations and the 2027 opening will reveal how people will flow through a building that already suffers from a confusing layout with the back wing added by architect Frank Gehry served by separate elevators from the front. Judgement as to whether the new space is logical or necessary will have to wait until it launches … after Jost departs.