| Alexandra Suda | |
| Birth Place: | Ontario, Canada |
| Education: | Princeton University (BA) Williams College (MA) New York University (PhD) |
| Known For: | Art history CEO of the Philadelphia Museum of Art |
Alexandra Suda (born 1981) is a Canadian art historian who was formerly the director of the National Gallery of Canada.[1] In June 2022, she was appointed to be the director and chief executive officer (CEO) of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which is among the largest art museums in the United States.[2]
Suda is often known as Sasha Suda.[3]
Suda was born in 1981 in Toronto, Ontario, to parents who were immigrants from Czechoslovakia.[4] She completed a BA at Princeton University, an MA at Williams College, before earning her PhD at The Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.[5] Suda's doctoral dissertation is entitled "The Making of Girona Martyrology and the Cult of Saints in Late Medieval Bohemia" and was published in 2016.[6]
Suda's career as a professional art historian started at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. She had a variety of roles at the museum, all in the Medieval Department. These roles were in the time period 2003 to 2011.
While at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Suda received an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship to continue her doctoral research.[7]
In 2011, Suda became an assistant curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. She later became the Curator of European Art at the gallery.[8]
According to the Governor General's Canadian Leadership Conference, her Small Wonders: Gothic Boxwood Miniatures exhibition, held in Ontario, New York and Amsterdam, "received extensive positive press for its high level of scholarship which is driven by the public's curiosity about these wondrous works of art."
During her time at the gallery, Suda re-worked the European art collection and its presentation to better engage broad audiences.[9]
In April 2019, Suda was named director and CEO of the National Gallery of Canada. At the time of her appointment at age 38, she was the youngest person to hold this post at the gallery in more than a century.[10]
As director and CEO, Suda was credited with developing a strategic plan for the National Gallery of Canada, expanding the organization's diversity and inclusion, and enhancing the general reputation of the gallery. These accomplishments occurred despite the additional difficulties resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. The strategic plan for organizational change at the National Gallery of Canada was referred to by the term "ankosé", from the Ojibwe language meaning that everything is connected.[11]
Critics have argued that Suda was relatively inexperienced for the position at the National Gallery, and did not speak French as well as English. Some of her actions (and those of her interim successor, Angela Cassie) in support of the strategic plan and “decolonization”,[12] were described as being directed by "dogma".[13] Restructuring and significant staff dismissals were criticized as creating an unstable environment and losing key institutional knowledge from the institution.[14]
In 2020, Suda was part of a jury that chose Canadian artist Stan Douglas to represent Canada at the Venice Biennale annual exhibition in Italy.[15]
In June 2022, the Philadelphia Museum of Art announced that Suda would assume the role of director at the Museum in September of that year.[16] The title of the position is the George D. Widener Director and CEO.[17]
In September 2022, workers at that museum held a strike over wages and working conditions[18] which lasted 19 days.[19] The strike started within days of Suda's being officially installed in the directorship, and the labor dispute had been ongoing well before Suda's time at the museum.[20] She stayed publicly silent on the matter with a museum spokesperson saying she would not be part of the negotiations.[21] Later, Suda stated that the labor settlement "laid a solid foundation."
In her previous position at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Suda had been a labor union member.
During Suda's tenure at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the museum has created the Brind Center for African and African Diasporic Art, with its own curators, who are responsible for maintaining the collection and developing programing. The Brind Center is the museum's first African-oriented department, with an intent to appeal to a broad audience. At the time the Brind Center was established, Suda stated that its curators should work with curators across the various departments within the museum, rather than limiting their efforts to their own collections, to overcome organizational stovepiping.[22]