Dear friends of Or Gallery:

After a five year tenure, we are bidding farewell to Director/Curator Denise Ryner who has returned to Berlin to complete a project at Haus der Kulturen der Welt. Denise led Or Gallery through a rigorous period involving a profoundly influential roster of local and international programming and community engagement. She also led the relocation of the gallery with the expansion of the bookstore, the development of a new website and the organization of numerous BIPOC curatorial mentorships. Denise has left the gallery program in a strong position with guest curated exhibitions running through to the spring of 2023. Like so many of you, we are incredibly grateful for her contributions to the Or and the artistic life of the city, and we will be excited to follow her future collaborations and artistic projects.

Or Gallery has decided to take a moment of pause before proceeding with the Director/Curator position search to reflect on the future direction of the gallery and the role of artist-run centres today. As a board we will be engaging with these critical questions through a planning process led by consultant Caitlin Jones. As former Executive Director of BCA and Western Front Society, Caitlin brings a wealth of successful leadership experience to these concerns, and we are looking forward to working with her, seeking continued input from our community, and adding new members to the Board of Directors prior to our next steps.

We want to acknowledge with gratitude, Programme Coordinator Jamie Ward and Gallery Coordinator Katrina Goetjen for stepping up as a team to steward the gallery during this period. If you don’t know them already, we encourage you to drop by the gallery to say hello. Thank you to the community at large for demonstrating kindness and interest as we enter this transitionary period. We are eager to engage with your comments, suggestions, and hopes for the future of Or Gallery, and we are very excited to approach the 40th Anniversary in 2023 with a renewed commitment to building on the incredible history of this organization, cherished by so many.

Sincerely,

Or Gallery Board of Directors:

Althea Thauberger
Dana Qaddah
Missla Libsekal
Colleen Brown
James Albers
Lorna Brown
Simon Grefiel

Any questions or inquiries during this transitory period can be sent to or@orgallery.org.

The Or Gallery is an artist-run centre committed to exhibiting work by local, national, and international artists whose art practice is of a critical, conceptual and/or interdisciplinary nature. Since its inception in 1983 the gallery has acted as a space for research, proposition making, conceptual experimentation and documentation.