Josh Basseches, shown here in 2019, is stepping down as CEO of the Royal Ontario Museum at the end of this year.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
The Royal Ontario Museum’s chief executive officer Josh Basseches will leave his post later this year after nearly a decade.
Canada’s most-visited museum is in the midst of a $130-million transformation billed as OpenROM. Launched under Basseches’s watch, it’s intended to reimagine much of the ROM’s main floor, redesign its Bloor Street West entrance and add 6,000 square feet of new gallery space.
Basseches announced his departure from the culture, natural-history and art museum Thursday morning. He will remain in the role until the end of 2025. The museum did not announce a successor, but in a press release, said that its board of trustees would immediately start searching for a replacement.
“With the museum well-positioned for its next chapter, this feels like the right moment for me to head towards new challenges and seize new opportunities,” Basseches said in the release.
Postmedia CEO Andrew MacLeod, who was recently appointed as the ROM board of trustees’ chair, said in a statement that the search for a new ROM chief would “be informed and inspired by the impressive trajectory” Basseches set for the museum.
Like many cultural institutions, the ROM has spent the past five years reckoning with an unpredictable economic environment: revenue-shattering pandemic lockdowns followed by surging inflation and interest rates.
While the province of Ontario has provided “stabilization” grants since Covid-19 first struck in 2020, its baseline operating grant for the museum has hovered around $27.3-million for more than a decade.