The Vancouver Art Gallery is laying off around 30 unionised employees, as well as a number of non-union staff, due to “unsustainable annual deficit”.
Jasmine Bradley from the Vancouver Art Gallery’s communications department told the Vancouver Sun: “The cuts are across the organization, every department, all levels.”
The gallery currently has 129 full-time staff, she said.
Warren Williams, president of Vancouver-based trade union CUPE Local 15, said that 29 of the museum‘s unionised staff will be affected by the job cuts.
The gallery is “offering severance packages, which are somewhat better than the collective agreement language allows”, Williams said.
“Unsustainable annual deficit”
He added, “The employer has been pretty good about that. They’re in a deficit financially, there’s no doubt about that.”
The layoffs come after the Vancouver Art Gallery reported a loss of $2.85 million in operating revenue during the last fiscal year.
Jon Stovell, chair of the Vancouver Art Gallery’s board of trustees, said the institution has “never really returned to pre-Covid attendance levels”.
The job cuts have been made, Stovell said, to avoid an “unsustainable annual deficit”, as he expects a deficit “similar in magnitude” in the current financial year.
In December, the Vancouver Art Gallery cancelled its plans for a new art gallery designed by Swiss firm Herzog and de Meuron.
Increasing costs and museum layoffs
The institution still plans to build a new gallery, but it will be more modest due to increasing costs, according to Stovell.
“Through this hyper-inflationary cycle that we’ve been in, everything has gotten more expensive — insurance, shipping, wages, repairing the [current] building – everything’s been more,” he said.
“I think the gallery also had been kind of scaling up a little bit in preparation for this new building — building a bigger team, and having all the extra costs of managing the project.”
Other North American museums to announce layoffs this year include the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
