An image greets visitors as they enter Every. Now. Then: Reframing Nationhood, my final exhibition for the Art Gallery of Ontario.

It’s called The Edge of a Moment and the artist, Meryl McMaster, is seen pausing at the lip of Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, a sheer cliff face in Southern Alberta: Treaty 7 territory, her ancestors’ homeland. As she moves north, her face, masked with white paint, turns toward me, away from the cliff.

She’s not looking at me, of course, but the image makes me feel conspicuous and so very present: McMaster, a strong voice within an emerging generation of Indigenous artists, moves with a confidence tinged with anxiety and sadness as she calls her “ancestors to travel with her into the future” — a future weighed down by the presence of my ancestors and our colonial legacy.

I had the honour to co-curate Every. Now. Then. with Anique Jordan, an artist, activist and independent curator based in Toronto. It was our critical response to Canada 150, designed to be a catalyst for significant change within an institution that remains (like so many others in this country) burdened by, and seemingly committed to, a deeply problematic and divisive history defined by exclusion and erasure.

Carried by the confident voices of many artists, Every. Now. Then. embodies the momentum of transformation that so many of us felt was powerful and real. Its reception, both publicly and critically, has been remarkable and moving; it confirmed for me that this messy, problematic initiative is in sync with this moment.

So my decision to give up my senior position at the AGO during the run of this exhibition has come as a surprise to many. Why leave now?

My choice rests in a disappointment: not in what we achieved, but the fragility of its ability to persist. As I leave, I worry about an institution wavering in its commitment to make space for new voices — voices traditionally excluded from senior roles at public cultural institutions in Canada.

It rests in issues that have informed my work as a curator, artist, writer and educator for almost three decades: the elitist, colonial roots of public museums, what being a public institution truly means, and who controls and is allowed to speak in these nominally “public” realms.

I have always been concerned about the role art museums play in the wider world, about how truly engaged they are with the critical issues of our times. I’m fortunate to be able to teach regularly on museum and curatorial practice (currently in the graduate program at OCAD University). We often begin with the origins of the contemporary museum, which was born out of the private collections of wealthy Europeans who had built their fortunes on the extraction of resources, and people, from the most vulnerable nations in the world.

Out of this dubious practice evolved public educational institutions, or so they self-described. Really, they were outward displays of power that reinforced class division and validated the corporate and colonial systems that had made their founders rich. From wealth came power and then cultural dominance: museums set social rules, coercing the broader public toward shared values they deemed to be “acceptable.”

Despite everything, for most institutions, that’s the model that remains: “Value” is decided by the very few and then presented to the many. When I look at the AGO and so many of its peers, I see an institution guided not by public participation, but by the generic, elite consensus that rules the global art market, which sees product over public good.

I see institutions that look for leadership and to fill critical content roles outside of this community and country (a remarkable community, by the way, of cultural professionals with diverse and distinct voices that has been deeply invested here for decades). At the AGO, the curatorial department is becoming dominated (at various levels) by individuals from, or primarily trained in, the United States. It has become abundantly clear to me that it is highly unlikely that the currently vacant position of chief curator — a critical role, from which many content decisions flow — will be filled by a Canadian.

I see too many who lack true knowledge of this place. I see those same people committed to sustaining dated academic divisions that wrongly take priority over the kinds of interdisciplinary, cross-cultural, community-focused work that is desperately needed for our culture to adapt and evolve.

The current program of reinstalling the permanent collections of European and Modern art, called Look: Forward, lays bare this disconnect: it lacks any deep engagement with Canada, Canadian art or the diversity of this community.

I see overgrown institutions grounded in a corporate model that appears uncritically committed to expansion at a time when we should all be making it a priority to question its role in the public conversation here, and acting against the destructive impulse of such generic “world class” aspirations.

The star system of the contemporary “art world” and the hierarchical corporate model create divisive, competitive, unhealthy environments for work. For Indigenous peoples, people of colour and many youth, these institutions remain unwelcoming spaces of trauma — spaces where their marginalization remains at the core of the institutions’ mission.

At the AGO, there have been some major contemporary exhibitions by compelling international artists in recent years (Theaster Gates and Hurvin Anderson, for example). But as with the new permanent collection program, very little has been done to ground these projects and make meaningful connections to the local, or break out of the rigidly defended curatorial silos. In these two examples specifically, opportunities for local engagement abounded; instead, they remained closed off by the barriers imposed by the global art world model, inoculated from real engagement.

Worse, they consistently overshadow, in profile and financial commitment, the work of leading artists in this region, who have significant, and long established, national and international careers. There are exceptions — Song Dong’s Communal Courtyard, initiated by former AGO chief curator Stephanie Smith, had a rich program of local content developed collaboratively across the institution and with community partners — but they’re all too rare.

Engaging with diversity has to mean more than just expanding an audience for an established model, to be more than some insidious missionary program of converting more to have faith in these institutions, and drawing communities into a program of their own marginalization and erasure.

These debates were front and centre when I was a student in the 1980s. The key critical texts of that time continue to be primary references, three decades on, confirming that little has changed.

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Reading again the words of James Baldwin, who offered searing criticisms of the deep, systemic racial barriers of his day, I find his words familiar and offering a kind of radical hope. At the close of No Name in the Street, from 1972, he writes of a crisis, of racism and colonialism, a “global, historical crisis” not about to resolve itself soon. “An old world is dying,” Baldwin declares, “and a new one, kicking in the belly of its mother, time, announces that it is ready to be born. This birth will not be easy, and many of us are doomed to discover that we are exceedingly clumsy midwives. No matter, so long as we accept that our responsibility is to the newborn: the acceptance of responsibility contains the key to the necessarily evolving skill.”

And so I return to The Edge of a Moment, to that image of Meryl McMaster moving across that sublime landscape. I imagine her turning away and continuing on as I struggle to keep up. She walks with her ancestors into the future while I plead with mine to stay behind, to give up and give back this space. Undepleted.

Andrew Hunter is the former curator of Canadian art for the Art Gallery of Ontario.