I am not on social media, but as I have said before, some of my best friends are, and they tell me what's trending -- where the mouths are and what's foaming at them. The Vancouver Art Gallery's recent hiring of eurowestern settler Anthony Kiendl as its director generated a fair amount of foam, coming as it did after a Canadian Art article noted the "crisis of whiteness" at the directorship and board level of most large-scale Canadian museums and galleries, in addition to an online CAMDO-ODMAC AGM that had only one non-white face in its massive ZOOM-sphere -- that of the Power Plant's Gaëtane Verna, who is of Haitian descent.
As much as we are shifting towards a relational outlook in all aspects of political economy and civil society, some of the best of us continue to isolate events and re-connect them to our own vicious, sometimes fictive, networks. A network I would prefer to connect the VAG hiring to concerns Kiendl's previous directorship at the Mackenzie Art Gallery -- how Kiendl's leaving the Mackenzie for the VAG created a space that was filled by Chickasaw artist/curator John G. Hampton, a hire that excites me in ways similar to how the hiring of Kiendl excites Hunkpapa Lakota artist and VAG hiring committee member Dana Claxton, who noted in the VAG press release: "[Anthony] has the ability to make an institution relevant in a particular place at a particular time and is especially cognizant of an art museum's relationship to power, relevance and diversity."
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