Position: Program Director
Location: grunt gallery
Reporting to: Board of Directors
Term: Full-time, permanent 35 hours/week. Evening and weekend work. Flexible schedule.
Start Date: May 1, 2019. As part of grunt gallery’s succession plan there will be a one year overlap between the incoming Program Director and the outgoing Program Director.

Application Deadline: February 28, 2019 @ 5:00pm PST

About grunt gallery:
Formed in 1984, grunt gallery is an artist-run centre located in the Mount Pleasant neighbourhood of Vancouver, BC. grunt gallery has built its reputation on innovative programs that showcase current and past work by contemporary Canadian and international artists. Working with a wide range of collaborators, grunt gallery confidently supports interdisciplinary projects, performance, media works, publications, websites, artist talks, research residencies, mentorships, publicly-sited projects and socially engaged initiatives alongside gallery-based exhibitions. grunt gallery continues to provide space for artistic agency, diverse perspectives, unruly practices and community connection.
URL: grunt.ca

Required Competencies:
Budget Development
Collaboration
Commitment
Communication
Creativity
Flexibility
Negotiation
Networking
Programming
Reliability
Tolerance
Grant Applications
Mentorship

General Description of the Position:
• The Program Director supports the organization’s mandate, public image and shares the overall mission and vision with the Board of Directors. The Program Director maintains the gallery’s relationships with donors, foundations, members, artists, patrons, stakeholders and the general public.
• The Program Director is the conceptual visionary of the organization, which includes fundraising and grant-writing, and should have extensive familiarity with local, national and international art communities.
• The Program Director is responsible for developing key connections to determine, develop and coordinate the annual programming of grunt gallery. In addition, the Program Director oversees work related to grunt gallery’s archivist and digital/physical archives—a key attribute to this work is activating grunt’s rich history and connecting it to ongoing programming.

• The Program Director works closely with the Operations Director to provide insight on overall direction and initiatives undertaken by the organization to ensure that key stakeholders and overall capacity of the organization, in consultation with the Business Manager, may be met effectively and collaboratively. The Program Director reports directly to the Board of Directors and is one of two senior members of the employee team.

General Responsibilities:
• Building grunt’s community reputation via networking, development and community engagement.
• Developing programming budgets and working with the Grant Writer to secure funding, through donors, foundations, public funding and private sources.
• Meeting regularly with staff and the Operations Director to ensure clear communication regarding programming, projects and development.
• Providing leadership and guidance to the curatorial committee to determine exhibition-based programming and projects.
• Liaising with artists to determine programming possibilities within grunt’s exhibition space and beyond the physical facility.
• Attending Board of Director meetings to provide programming and budget updates.
• Providing effective leadership and insight to the Communications Director to promote grunt’s history, programming and growing expanse of projects.
• Working with the Archives Manager to determine potential funding and programming to continue the development and operations of the archive.
• Evaluating annual programming in collaboration with grunt’s staff.
• Other duties as required.

Required Skills and Education:
• Ability to work collaboratively with permanent staff; project and/or contract and remote staff.
• Exceptional communication and coordination skills to ensure knowledge and comprehension of complex project planning can be effectively understood.
• Understanding grunt is a people-centred work environment that respects a variety of working styles, primarily independent, that thrives on communication to allow for creative autonomy and decision making amongst staff.
• Critically relevant curatorial experience with knowledge of diverse communities.
• Proven success with art programming and an excellent reputation within the art community, built on previous success, rapport with artists and the ability as act as a visionary.
• Excellent understanding of artist-run centres and non-profit policies and requirements.
• Proven ability to write grants.
• Strong working knowledge of financial development and reporting practices.
• A working intercultural skill-set to effectively work with a diverse group of staff, artists and community members, and a history of engagement with Indigenous and LGBTQ2 people.
• Preferably a post-secondary education in an arts related field.
• Confident problem-solving abilities. This applies to responding to unforeseen circumstances in a calm and strategic manner; plus, the ability to problem-solve issues that may arise with staff to maintain respectful relationships that encourages continued productivity.
• Must be highly organized, detail oriented, committed to quality and able to work independently with minimal supervision.
• Ability to work flexible hours.
• Experience in public relations, media relations, communications and community outreach.
• Proven responsible financial management experience with demonstrated cost-savings and working within budgets.

Business Ethics and the Workplace:
• The Program Director must promote and set the example for ensuring a friendly, courteous, respectful and professional workplace.
• The Program Director must maintain the confidentiality of all personal, private and professional information obtained within the course of their employment, in accordance with the grunt Privacy Policy.
• The Program Director must act in accordance with the grunt Workplace Relationship Policy, which prohibits the acceptance of gifts, loans or anything of value from any individuals with whom contact is had during the course of employment.

To Apply:
Please forward your cover letter outlining your interest in this position and relevant experience as well as a C.V. to Meagan  <meagan at grunt dot ca>
The preferred file format is PDF.

Application Deadline: February 28, 2019 @ 5:00pm PST. Only those shortlisted will be notified.

Remuneration: $52,000 – $58,000
This position is subject to a six month probationary period.

grunt gallery welcomes applications from members of visible minorities, women, Indigenous peoples, persons with disabilities, persons of minority sexual orientations and gender identities, and others with the skills and knowledge to productively engage with diverse communities

grunt gallery is located on the unceded, ancestral, and occupied, traditional lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Səl̓ílwətaʔ (Tsleil-Waututh), and Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) Nations of the Coast Salish peoples.

grunt gallery
#116 – 350 East 2nd Avenue
Vancouver, BC
V5T 4R8
604.875.9516
grunt.ca

grunt gallery’s Succession Plan for the transition of Program Directors

Program Director Glenn Alteen has worked with grunt since its inception in 1984 and in May of 2020 will retire after 36 years in the position. In early 2018 the board and staff of the gallery began activating our Succession Plan designed to provide as little disruption to the organization as possible during the transition of Program Directors. Our informed and active Succession Committee consisting of current and former board members and staff were tasked with addressing hiring in relation to leadership succession. After extensive work, the Committee has unrolled a timeline and hiring process for the transition. The Committee continues to refine this process on an ongoing basis and will address any succession planning issues as they arise.

A year-long transition period is being planned for the new Program Director in order to provide a seamless changeover and to download grunt’s programming and funding processes and allow for introductions to long-term artists, supporters and funders. grunt incorporated a Management Transition Reserve Fund into annual budgets since 2016 to facilitate this transition.

Formed in 1984, grunt gallery has built a reputation on innovative and dynamic programming: exhibitions, performances, artist talks, publications and special projects that showcase work by contemporary Canadian and international artists. grunt focuses on work and artists that would otherwise not be seen in Vancouver. We are proud of our ability to act as an intersection between various cultural groups based on aesthetics, medium or identity. With emerging programs such as the Blue Cabin Residency and the Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen grunt is expanding and developing its range, providing artists with new and exciting opportunities and audiences with unique and important experiences.

The Program Director job call will be released on Friday, January 18, 2019. You can access information from grunt gallery’s website grunt.ca and follow grunt gallery news through our monthly newsletter and social media channels: Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Contact Us:

Meagan Kus , Director of Operations

email: meagan at grunt dot ca
phone: #604-875-9516

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From artist editions to exhibition catalogues, find what you’re looking for in our newly designed online bookstore store.

From artist editions to exhibition catalogues, find what you’re looking for in our online bookstore store.

Image: Architecture Reearch 6, Jawa El Khash.

Get Four Faces of the Moon, ARCTICNOISE and Journey to Kaho’olawe for $45 (regular $65)!

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The Making of an Archive book is now available for purchase at our bookstore! The book is edited by Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn, grunt gallery’s Curator Vanessa Kwan and Archives Manager Dan Pon, with contributions by Liz Park, Gabrielle Moser, Fatima Jaffer, Dan Pon and Tara Robertson, Maiko Tanaka and an introduction by Vanessa Kwan. The publication is designed by Chris Lee.

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Please enjoy this deep, but short chat between Director/Curator Glenn Aleen (GA) and Curator Vanessa Kwan (VK) presented in short form.

For our first blog, we thought it was crucial to set up the site lines for both the beginning of grunt and where it currently stands today. These views are differently expressed through two generations of curatorial practice here at our artist-run centre and are the focus of this back and forth email conversation between our two curators. 

VK: I think this is a nice opportunity to talk about the curatorial priorities/ thoughts about grunt, and how it has evolved and continues to evolve. Maybe that’s a good place to start.

First question: Every time I introduce to a tour group or someone who has never visited the gallery before, I always start with the historical details: the gallery was founded in 1984, and the impetus at that time was to be a place for artists who were not, for whatever reason, being shown or recognized in Vancouver. This led to an emphasis on many practices and subjectivities being represented here – many from traditionally marginalized communities; artists of colour, queer artists, Indigenous artists and performance artists all found a place to show their work and build community. Does this work with your own thoughts/recollections of those foundational years?

VK: And as a follow-up question – how do you see this mandate having evolved?

GA: I understand the introduction we give but these days it often gets read solely through the lens of identity politics which doesn’t really tell the whole story. Not to say that identity politics wasn’t there at the time, it was, but it also included other marginal practices that get left by the wayside in the retelling sometimes. The art scene was a lot more siloed then in all kinds of ways and galleries and artist centres fit inside of these silos in ways that don’t happen so much now or at least not like that. And that marginality back then wasn’t just Indigenous, queer, feminist, or POC artists’ communities but included outsider artists, graffiti artists, comic artists, performance artists, etc.  Also, contemporary artists doing serious work in ceramics or printmaking or textile work. grunt was really about breaking down the silos or working across them in many ways. I guess intersectional really–though that word wasn’t used at the time. Because of this plurality, people had a hard time categorizing what we were doing because it didn’t fit any of the reductive lenses they were looking at us through. They thought of us as all over the place, scattered and maybe a bit unfocused. In hindsight, I think that was really the point, but it took a while before some people got it.

The nature of the community that got created was really based in diversity. You knew going to grunt that you would have conversations with people who weren’t like you and see art that wasn’t like yours. The people who felt the most comfortable were the ones who didn’t feel that comfortable anywhere else. It was a community of loners in many ways. I remember Aiyyana Maracle saying after she made her transition that without grunt it would have been a much harder experience. It was the one place she felt normal and nobody was judging her.

How did the mandate evolve? I think mostly in response to the art world itself. It changed and we changed in response. In the 1990s few galleries would show Indigenous contemporary art. There were places to show if you were doing traditional work but it was much harder for contemporary work. Especially if you were an emerging artist. So, many would apply at grunt because they had so few other choices and we had to respond. You would show one and six more would apply. This is no longer the situation. Indigenous emerging artists are everywhere now – as they should be. As you know the last part of our curatorial process is asking if we didn’t show a certain artist or body of work would it get shown in Vancouver? That question we have been asking since the beginning but the nature of what work fits that category is always changing. But it wasn’t just oppositional though. I think grunt’s success is that the larger art world recognizes how important that mandate has been to a healthier art community.

In your court!

VK: I like this clarification of how things took shape in the early years. I think my tendency is to put a lens on what grunt did back then so it aligns with a particular cultural or political context, but you’re right – it was about a true (and uncategorizable) diversity of forms and personalities coming together. Paul Wong once said to me that he thought grunt was the “gangly nerd” of the Vancouver arts community, and that phrase has stuck with me ever since – maybe because the idea of a nerd is that there’s a weirdness there that resists a clear picture of what the future holds: the archetype (can you say a nerd is archetypal??) of the nerd is that they grow up to be something you probably didn’t expect, and possibly underestimated.

Now we say in our “About” blurb that grunt focusses on practices “that challenge and problematize existing hierarchies of cultural value” which is another way of saying we try to remain responsive to what’s happening culturally. I really appreciate this aspect of how grunt works. I think it’s typical in the art world to look at what has currency and try to get ahead of that curve (it is a speculative market economy after all) and I would say grunt has another kind of investment philosophy. You and I have talked a bit about non-proprietary approaches to cultural capital, and also about what it might mean to disseminate rather than accrue resources. This is ranging dangerously close to navel-gazing, but I wonder what you think about capital and how it has been disseminated over the years through the gallery and what it does. I say this knowing that grunt has also engaged wholeheartedly in financial capital expansion (we own the space we’re in, we have worked and continue to work with for-profit developers to gain stability, etc), and it’s important to be clear that a flexible approach to cultural capital comes from the privileges of having a sustainable place to be and operate.

And then, with all this in mind, how do you see the new things on the horizon playing into these ideas? The Blue Cabin, the Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen are all big new projects for grunt, and represent unknown directions for the gallery. How do you think these new projects will expand or evolve our mandate? Will they?

GA: Paul is right we were the gangly nerd on the scene and in some ways we still are. We certainly weren’t hip or happening or trying to be. The real reason we called it grunt was because it wasn’t cool or clever. It was basic, base and a little repugnant. And despite the fact there was incredible diversity among us in hindsight it wasn’t very politically correct back then; people didn’t watch their tongues and got called out on it all the time. That said in hindsight, also those were gentler times before social media and there was a sense of humour about it that there isn’t now (and I’m not suggesting there should be now!). But in that flux, a lot of things could happen and did. So instead of a highly negotiated space, it was more like a barely negotiated space and lots of alliances, friendships, and collaborations emerged, some still continuing. And the clashes weren’t hostile – they were enjoyed for the most part. They took us places no one else was headed. When you throw personalities into the mix things happened. And there were some big personalities all who left their marks. And they formed and informed what we were doing.

I appreciate what you’re saying about our cultural capital approach. It is non-proprietary but that’s only part of it. Our ability to take cultural capital from one place and move it into a different arena is essential to grunt’s history and something it still uniquely does. We have been very successful in taking our credibility in one area and using it to open up opportunities in a completely unrelated area where frankly we should have no credibility at all. This plays out in all kinds of ways. One of the reasons we were able to purchase our space 20 years ago was we had done the Mount Pleasant Community Fence the year before and worked pretty much with the entire community, so we had incredible word-of-mouth in the community at that moment. That paid out directly with the development company we eventually worked within a marketing deal that enabled us to purchase the space. They were looking for the community credibility we had, but it was definitely a big part of that project. The year before it probably wouldn’t have worked. Recognizing that opportunity was a big part of it though.

Those shifts have been essential to our growth. I notice we change modes every 6 or 7 years. In 1999 we started LIVE and left it in 2005, We spent the next six years producing websites and then in 2011 started into grunt archives. Now in 2018, we are taking on Residencies and the Urban Screen. Again though, we are using our credibility in certain areas to move into other areas. It always means we are moving into areas where we have no expertise and we need to learn new skills and best practices. In many ways, the work we have done in the last few years around institutional structures and how we look at them has made us more resilient and able to take on these challenges, but it’s still a tall order. But we were ready to expand. We paid off our mortgage so had very cheap facility costs so The Blue Cabin didn’t look so onerous. It’s an exciting project that mixes cultural production and heritage in ways we haven’t seen before and I think it will open up space for artists and create a unique public monument. The Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen was really more opportunistic. We were offered an urban screen to program media art and in many ways to take it at face value would have been problematic. By turning the curatorial focus for the screen on the community we have an opportunity to take this to places urban screens have never really gone before.

What ties our work together, though, is working out of a sense of a larger community, and that word “community” has evolved in meaning over the past 35 years. Along with collaboration, these two really have been present through all the stages. Also what has evolved, I think, is grunt understands its role in the ecology now more then we did at the beginning, how we fit in and what we need to do. Will these projects live up to their potential or our vision for them? I hope so, but they are both important to do even if we fall flat on our faces. What they become will be interesting to watch and develop. I think looking for successes and failures is not as interesting as watching the paths they will take us on. The work is the reward. I’m not sure they expand our mandate as much as evolve it. They will definitely give artists opportunities they never had before. That’s always good. ⃢

Please come back for the next blog to be released soon at grunt.ca