Chief Curator

Glenbow seeks a visionary leader to become its next Chief Curator. As one of Canada’s leading museums with an extraordinary breadth of collections, including the largest visual arts collection in western Canada, one of the country’s foremost Indigenous collections, core strengths in Africa, Asia, military history, folk art, Western settler culture, and a library and archival collection focused on the visual arts, Glenbow offers the promise of new stories, new dialogues, and new directions for a museum program in the twenty-first century. 

Glenbow is on the cusp of renovating its 1975 building in the heart of downtown Calgary. This project will provide the museum’s team the opportunity to reconsider the use of nearly 300,000 square feet of space, and to reimagine its entire public-facing operation, including all exhibitions and use of collections, and how they will activate communities and demonstrate relevance to a diverse city while further defining its mandate as an art museum.  

The Chief Curator will lead many of these discussions, and must be a creative and flexible thinker with a proven track record of questioning museum conventions, and leading change in complex cultural institutions. They must be comfortable working across disciplines, and be able to enliven art and artifacts from a spectrum of cultural and collected histories. One of Glenbow’s core strengths is the eclectic nature of its holdings, reflecting the avid interests of its founder, Eric Harvie, and his belief that art, objects and entities from diverse origins would, together, enrich the lives of Calgarians. Candidates for the position should be inspired by the opportunity to tease new relationships from among these collections, and to pursue targeted acquisitions that will affirm the museum’s position as a leader in understanding of how the arts frame the human experience.

Candidates must also demonstrate a sensitivity to the ethics and politics of working with Indigenous collections and partners. Glenbow remains a leader in Indigenous consultation and access among Canadian museums, a role in our national community we will continue to grow. The Chief Curator must interrogate what it means to design a nationally-significant museum program in an era of reconciliation, and, working with Indigenous curators, will participate in consultations with Indigenous communities and stakeholders on the development of our Indigenous programs within the renovated museum. 

For full job description please visit: www.glenbow.org/about/careers/current.cfm

Submit your resume and cover letter to careers@glenbow.org referencing "Chief Curator Application" in the subject. 

Notice on hiring during the COVID-19 pandemic:

Glenbow is committed to a safe and healthy hiring process for all positions during this period of uncertainty. Interviews will be conducted via videoconference to ensure social distancing as long as such measures are advisable by health officials. The timing for new employees to commence positions may be impacted, as the museum is currently closed pending developments in the pandemic. Glenbow will discuss options will all prospective employees.

We expect to hire this position in the fall of 2020, pending health restrictions.