As the AGO’s chief curator and deputy director, Julian Cox championed several notable acquisitions and oversaw the founding of the Department of the Arts of Global Africa and the Diaspora.Cole Burston/The Globe and Mail
After eight years as the Art Gallery of Ontario’s chief curator and deputy director, Julian Cox has stepped down. The announcement was made on Tuesday.
Upon his hiring, the London-born curator and museum administrator said it was the “right time in my professional life for fresh challenges.” That time has apparently arrived again.
In a press statement, AGO director and chief executive officer Stephan Jost said Cox had a “profound and positive impact” on the publicly funded gallery, and that the “quality and appeal of the AGO’s exhibitions, the significant growth of the collection, and his deep commitment to scholarship, all stand as hallmarks of his successful tenure.”
Cox joined the AGO in 2018.The Canadian Press
It was Jost who hired Cox away from the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, where he had been chief curator since 2010.
Cox did not provide a comment. His last day with the AGO will be April 13.
The announcement was made less than a month after the gallery was rocked by the resignations of a senior curator and two volunteer members of a collections committee that narrowly voted not to acquire a video work by Nan Goldin over accusations that the Jewish-American photographer has antisemitic views.
The AGO had planned to jointly purchase Goldin’s Stendhal Syndrome with the Vancouver Art Gallery and Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center.
AGO trustee, major donor Judy Schulich led internal push to prevent Nan Goldin acquisition
Photography is Cox’s specialty. He earned a master of philosophy degree in the history of photography from the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth (now Aberystwyth University), in 1990. While working at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles early in his career, he co-organized exhibitions of Man Ray and Julia Margaret Cameron at the AGO.
Among the notable acquisitions he championed were works from the Montgomery Collection of Caribbean Photographs, the Estate of Philip B. Lind, and the photographs of Peter Hujar.
During a tenure that began in January, 2018, he oversaw the founding of the Department of the Arts of Global Africa and the Diaspora and stewarded the gallery’s collection through deaccessioning, acquisitions and commissions.
He also brought exhibitions Matthew Wong: Blue View; Leonard Cohen: Everybody Knows; KAWS: FAMILY; and the currently showing Ranbir Sidhu: No Limits. He leaves behind the AGO’s first public art commission, Couch Monster: Sadzěʔ yaaghęhch’ill, a monumental bronze sculpture of an elephant by Brian Jungen installed in 2022 outside the gallery.
The AGO said recruitment to replace Cox would begin in the coming months.