The Vancouver Art Gallery Association announced on Tuesday (25 March) that Anthony Kiendl, the gallery’s chief executive and director since 2020, has left to “pursue other professional and personal interests”.
The end of Kiendl’s five-year tenure at the helm of the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG) comes on the heels of its leaders scrapping plans for a new, Herzog & de Meuron-designed building last December. A decade in the planning, the gallery’s new 310,000 sq. ft home was to be built on a city-owned property some 500 metres from the VAG’s current location in a historic courthouse building. The project was cancelled after costs ballooned from C$400m ($280m) to C$600m ($420m), but not before C$60m ($42m) had already been invested.
“It was a mutually agreed outcome sometime in the making,” Jon Stovell, the chairman of the gallery’s board, tells The Art Newspaper. “Anthony had plans of his own and we had change of direction with the new building—so it seemed like a logical time for a parting of ways.”
In a statement, the board praised Kiendl. “Under his leadership, the gallery navigated its way through the Covid-19 pandemic, transformed its programming and has grown its donor base, membership and attendance. He has advanced Indigenous reconciliation and helped secure lead funding for the gallery’s new home.”
Kiendl inherited the building project from his predecessor, Kathleen Bartels, who stepped down after 18 years at the helm in 2019 following a strike at the gallery and amid ongoing issues related to the new gallery project. Kiendl oversaw a “ground awakening” ceremony on the site in the autumn of 2023, but a year later work on the site was paused and the ground was never broken.
Subsequently a new plan was hatched to hire a Canadian architectural firm to build a more modest building on the same site. To that end, 14 firms were shortlisted last month, among them the Toronto-based firm Hariri Pontarini Architects (which is designing the new Marianne and Edward Gibson Art Museum at Simon Fraser University) and the Vancouver-based firm Patkau Architects (which designed the Audain Art Museum in Whistler).
Stovell says that despite the change of leadership, the new building project is “on track and schedule”, an architect will be chosen by early June and the board “is in no rush to hire a new director”, estimating that a new one will be chosen by the end of the year. Eva Respini, the gallery’s deputy director and the director of curatorial programmes, and Sirish Rao, the director of public engagement and learning, will serve as co-interim leaders.
It is hard not to see the new gallery project as an albatross around the neck of any potential new director. And with US President Donald Trump’s trade war and other issues straining federal coffers, there is concern that promised government money for cultural projects may go elsewhere—to the Department of National Defence, for example.
Meanwhile, the prominent Vancouver real estate marketer and collector Bob Rennie—a former chair of the North America Acquisitions Committee at the Tate and current chair of collections at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC—and a longtime critic of the new VAG building project, continues to call for an audit.
“Dismissing one person does not make up for the fact that C$60m of philanthropic and taxpayer dollars was spent with absolutely nothing to show for it,” he says. “In this age of philanthropists questioning every move and politicians watching every tax dollar, I don’t understand why there is not a full disclosure of the C$60m so they can move on properly.” He adds: “Now forever people are going to say, ‘Is this going to be another VAG fiasco?’ It’s become a poster child for abuse of funds.”
Stovell says the gallery’s leadership is “sensitive to the fact that there’ s been a disappointment”, adding that when planning for a new gallery began 14 years ago, construction was less expensive and there was “ lots of international money coming into town”. Now, he says, “We’re re-calibrating our response to the times we’re in by focusing on the art rather than the building.” It can still be beautiful, he suggests, but perhaps “less of a statement”.
For his part, Kiendl tells The Art Newspaper that “VAG is among the leading art museums in North America and is close to my heart. I only have interest in it continuing.” He adds: “We mutually decided to part ways and I’m really looking forward to the future working on other professional and personal projects.”
One of these will see him return to the gallery for the 16 April opening of the multi-disciplinary artist Lucy Raven’s Murderer’s Bar, her first comprehensive show in North America. Curated by Kiendl, the exhibition will feature video work with sculptural elements delving into narratives of the American West, co-commissioned and jointly acquired by the VAG and the Vega Foundation.