After a decade in the role, the director and chief executive of the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), Josh Basseches, announced on 5 June that he would be leaving the post at year’s end to seek “new challenges”. During Basseches’s tenure the museum—which opened over a century ago with war looming in 1914—underwent three renovations and one expansion.
He unabashedly calls it “one of the world’s great museums”. It is Canada’s most-visited museum—it had 1,114,325 visitors in 2024, according to The Art Newspaper’s most recent survey of museum attendance—and boasts a collection of around 18 million items, more than the population of the province. The ROM’s board of trustees will be launching a search for an able successor.
“It has been an honour to lead this institution through what has been a truly transformative period in its history,” Basseches said in a statement. “During this time, we have created an even greater museum together, a thriving cultural and civic hub and an inspiring place to better understand the world around us. With a global reputation, an exceptional collection and cutting-edge research, coupled with a committed staff, boards, donors, volunteers and our strong partnership with the province of Ontario, there is so much more to come.”
Among the changes at the museum under Basseches was the reopening of the heritage Weston Entrance on Queen’s Park, the addition of an outdoor performance terrace and the Reed Family Plaza. A visitor highlight has been the creation of the Willner Madge Gallery Dawn of Life, a 10,000 sq. ft gallery dedicated to the origins of life.
Basseches also initiated a C$130m ($96m) renovation and expansion project last year, dubbed OpenROM and helped by a C$50m ($36.6m) donation from the Hennick Family Foundation. The aim is to turn the museum into a cultural and community hub while adding some 6,000 sq. ft of new gallery space.
Among the most notable offerings under Basseches’ leadership were ROM originals Christian Dior, Kent Monkman: Being Legendary and Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away. Other notable presentations included Out of the Depths: The Blue Whale Story, Treasures of a Desert Kingdom: The Royal Arts of Jodhpur, India, Chihuly and T. rex: The Ultimate Predator. It was the dinosaurs that turned on many a youngster to the museum, as this writer can attest.
Basseches’s tenure was not without controversy. In late 2023, in the early weeks of the Israel-Hamas war, the museum was accused of censoring a work by the Palestinian American artist Jenin Yaseen, though the painting in question was ultimately reinstated.