Vancouver Art Gallery to lay off around 30 employees

The Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG) will lay off around 30 staff members as part of what a spokesperson described as “the difficult but necessary process of reducing its operating budget to ensure long-term sustainability.”

“Staff have been informed that reductions will take place across all areas of the gallery, including staffing. These are hard decisions, but they are being made with care and a continued commitment to our public mission,” the spokesperson added in a statement. “Out of respect for our staff and the process currently underway with [Vancouver Municipal, Education and Community Workers (CUPE)] Local 15, no further information will be provided at this time.”

A spokesperson tells The Art Newspaper that there may be “more details to share next week”.

In a 23 June memo to gallery staff, Warren Williams, the president of CUPE 15—the union that represents workers from a number of organizations and institutions in the city, including the VAG—said he was “deeply saddened by the employer’s recent decision”. He added: “Although the union has not yet completed its comprehensive evaluation, we have made the difficult decision to permit the employer to present voluntary severance package offers to individual employees.”

Williams tells The Art Newspaper that 29 or 30 unionised staff will be laid off, accounting for around around 20% of the 150 gallery staff members represented by CUPE 15. He adds that he is unsure how many non-union staff will be laid off as part of the cuts. (The last time workers there went on strike, in 2019, there were 200 union members employed by the gallery.)

The mass layoffs come three months after the gallery’s director and chief executive Anthony Kiendl left the institution and six months after it cancelled plans for a new C$600m ($420m) building designed by the Swiss architecture firm Herzog and de Meuron after costs ballooned by 50%.

The gallery began to review proposals from 14 Canadian architecture firms for a more cost-effective design in March and had originally planned to announce the chosen design this month. The layoffs have raised doubts about the timeline for the new building project, which is already a decade and a half in the planning.

In the VAG’s most recent annual financial report covering up to the end of June 2024, a C$32.1m ($23.4m) deficiency of revenue over expenses was noted. This was a significant downturn from a C$35.9m ($26.1m) surplus of revenue over expenses in the previous year, though the change was largely due to a huge cut in provincial funding. In fiscal year2023-24, the gallery received C$887,673 ($646,000) from the government of British Columbia, down from $27.5m ($20m) in the previous fiscal year. In that same span revenue from admissions rose only 2.6%, totalling to $2.7m (just under $2m) in the fiscal year that ended 30 June 2024.

The layoffs come as the city of Vancouver, one of the VAG’s funders, has announced budget cuts and hiring freezes across multiple sectors. Simultaneously, the provincial government revealed that costs from hosting six matches during next year’s Fifa World Cup have ballooned to C$624m ($454m)—more than the cost of the scrapped Herzog and de Meuron design for a new VAG building.

Williams says that CUPE 15 will continues to negotiate for “better severance packages—as our collective agreement allows for our members. Those who want to move on from the gallery need a financial incentive to do so as well as protection of benefits for a certain amount of time and career counselling.”

“Considering the financial status of the gallery and the new site being put on hold—they are in a bit of a pickle,” Williams adds. “We also have members who work at the Museum of Vancouver and the Maritime Museum—institutions that are also struggling financially, with most funding by donations. They are viable cultural entities in our city and both the civic and provincial governments should be supporting them.”