At a moment when many artists and arts workers feel increasingly distant from the institutions that shape their professional and cultural lives—and determine their income—questions about institutional leadership and operations have taken on new urgency, especially in light of ongoing controversies around donors and financial transparency.

Institutions are sites of power and control, but also of possibility. They shape our understanding of art through the exhibitions they present and the structures they create. For many people, a public art museum is their first encounter with art and what they see there often defines what they think art is. Curator, writer, and researcher Kate Wong brings this question into the local context: why do arts institutions feel so disconnected from artists, arts workers, and communities in Toronto? This line of inquiry forms the basis of SITE Toronto, a newly formed not-for-profit that positions itself as a new kind of institution for contemporary art.

Wong’s approach to shaping SITE Toronto is informed by an awareness of what the word “institution” means: how it affects people, and how institutions, in turn, shape society alongside the communities they serve. She understands the term within a broader framework that spans national museums, kunsthalles, university galleries, and even artist-run centres and grassroots organizing. For Kate, institutions at their best are not fixed structures, but ongoing processes and active sites developed in relation to place and people, grounded in relationships and shared responsibility.

Wong has held curatorial and leadership positions in Canada and internationally, including commercial galleries like Sadie Coles HQ and artist-run centres and non-profit arts institutions like V.O Curations, Serpentine Galleries, and MOCA Toronto. I first met her a few years ago, somewhat fittingly, while I was interviewing for a job at an institution. We reconnected more recently to discuss how our thinking around institutions has shifted over time, and what kinds of structures might be possible moving forward. 

SITE Toronto first took shape as independent research undertaken in part during a curatorial residency at Fogo Island Arts, and then as part of a three-part public program at Mercer Union in August and September 2025, engaging local artists and communities in conversations about what an institution could be. The project draws inspiration from a range of international models, including SESC in Brazil, RAW Material Company in Dakar, and Park Fiction in Hamburg, examples that demonstrate how institutions might operate differently depending on their local social and cultural contexts.

With SITE Toronto’s first initiative, a residency program designed to support both local and international artists and curators, set to launch in March, I spoke with Wong about her curatorial practice, what “institution” means to her, and the significance of this new project.

 

 

 

When I talk about SITE Toronto as a new entity and use the word “institution,” I can sense that it brings up strong emotions for people. It does for me as well, and that’s why I’m invested in this work—to unpack these feelings, this complexity, and to build from it.

 

 

 

You’ve described institution-building as a form of curatorial practice. How do you define “institution” in this context?

I use the term “institution” very intentionally, rather than “arts organization,” because we live in a world structured by institutions. For me, shaping an arts institution is about creating something that extends beyond an individual, something that lasts beyond a single person or moment. It is a form of curatorial practice because it is deeply relational, and because it shapes the long-term social, intellectual, and material conditions through which art is produced and experienced.

Ideally, an institution is a framework that can shift and adapt to changing times and to the evolving desires of artists and communities. That’s why this work is so important. When I talk about SITE Toronto as a new entity and use the word “institution,” I can sense that it brings up strong emotions for people. It does for me as well, and that’s why I’m invested in this work—to unpack these feelings, this complexity, and to build from it. 

Could you tell me more about how you came to your work as a curator?

My father is a painter, and my mother—after running a framing shop and art gallery in Vancouver for two decades—founded a charitable organization supporting the education of women in rural China. Yet despite growing up around art, I did not spend my childhood visiting museums, nor did I know what a curator was until much later in life.

After moving to London in 2012 and working for over seven years with artists such as Sarah Lucas and Ding Yi within different commercial gallery contexts, I felt an increasingly urgent pull to develop my own curatorial practice. Working closely with artists and being able to travel and experience culture in many different parts of the world allowed me to understand that I too had something urgent to contribute to contemporary artistic discourse. 

Over the past twelve years, my approach as a curator evolved into a form of social practice. Across all my work, I seek to create the conditions in which contemporary artistic production can reveal—and contend with—the power structures that shape how we live.

How do you understand the role of the curator today? 

For me, curating is about observing, interpreting, and imagining. To do the work well requires both an attentiveness to the specificity of an artist and their practice, and an ability to situate that work meaningfully within a world that is constantly shifting. Increasingly, I understand my role not only as interpreting or framing artistic production, but as creating the conditions—the environment and infrastructure—through which art can be encountered, questioned, and lived with by the public.

Shaping an institution is an extension of this same practice. It involves negotiating power dynamics, positions, and competing desires. It requires a clear understanding of existing structures, alongside the capacity to imagine and build forms that can hold nuance and complexity.

How do you think your experiences working at different types of arts institutions have shaped the way you think about what an institution should be?

My perspective on institutions has been shaped by the galleries and arts organizations in which I have worked, but even more fundamentally by who I am. 

I grew up in Vancouver—a city structured by ongoing colonial systems, layered with successive waves of immigration, and marked by profound social and economic inequality. From an early age, I felt a strong sense of justice and a desire to work against inequality and exclusion. My curatorial practice is inseparable from this orientation.

I believe institutions—whether artistic, academic, or civic—do not merely reflect society, they actively shape it. They are sites where meaning and values are negotiated and contested. Institutions are not neutral containers; they are active structures that distribute power, as well as possibility.

Living in Vancouver, then Montreal, more than a decade in London, and now Toronto—alongside my family’s experience as immigrants with roots in China and Hong Kong—informs my curatorial practice and my understanding of institutions. They can reproduce inequity, but they can be shaped as sites of resistance and solidarity.

You mentioned that your curatorial practice is focused on social practice. I’m curious what kind of artists you work with and what draws you to their practices?

There’s definitely a social practice element to my curatorial work, but there’s also an interest in experimentation. I feel very stimulated by artists who are exploring new forms of contemporary artistic production. My work as a curator is not bound to any particular medium, geography, or temporality. What draws me in are artists who are putting forth something new—through the mediums they’re working in or the visual languages they’re employing. It’s about a perspective that feels fresh, like they’re saying something we haven’t quite heard before, a new way of seeing.  It could be an artist using paint in a way I’ve never seen before or using photography to propose something unexpected. That sense of newness often comes from how they’re thinking about living in the world. There’s a connection between the artistic output and the social conditions that shape it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Toronto is celebrated for its diversity and sense of community, but it also faces inequality and resource challenges. How does SITE Toronto respond to these realities? 

I think the way arts institutions frame and present artwork has a real impact on who feels invited into that work and who feels excluded. For public institutions funded by the government, there is a civic responsibility to move beyond historically elite models and to broaden access and engagement.

In Toronto, our arts ecosystem largely operates within a set of legacy frameworks. These range from the national museum model—emerging in the late eighteenth century, with the Louvre as an early example of a public museum built around a permanent collection—to the Kunsthalle model focused on commissioning and temporary exhibitions. Within this spectrum we also have university galleries and artist-run centres. These are the dominant institutional forms in the city, and they are the structures I engage with in my institution-building work.

What has become increasingly clear to me—through research over the past several years and especially through the community visioning process I facilitated at Mercer Union during the Groundwork exhibition—is that these models were developed in very different historical, economic, and social conditions. Artist-run centres, for example, emerged primarily in the 1960s and expanded across Canada in the 1970s. Many of Toronto’s existing centres were formed during that period. We are therefore working within structures that were designed sixty or seventy years ago, under radically different funding landscapes, property markets, and political realities.

My work is not to question whether these institutional models are valuable—they are—but to ask why they often feel out of sync with artists and publics, and why their underlying structures have remained largely unchanged despite profound social, economic, and cultural shifts. SITE Toronto emerges from that inquiry. It asks how we might rethink funding frameworks, governance models, and organizational design so institutions can respond to contemporary conditions rather than inherited ones. How do we build arts institutions in the twenty-first century that are both sustainable and equitable, and that genuinely serve the people who call Toronto home?

How would you describe Toronto’s art scene and its dynamics?

Having lived in Toronto for three years, I still consider myself a newcomer. Through situated research, lived experience, and building relationships with artists and arts workers deeply embedded in the city, I have come to understand Toronto as an arts ecosystem coloured by collectives and sustained by grassroots organizing.

At the same time, there is a significant disconnect and mistrust between Toronto’s larger arts institutions and the local arts community. I felt that early on while working as Curator at MOCA Toronto, and over time I’ve come to see it as structural—rooted in funding frameworks and systemic inequities. After October 7th, and in the context of the genocide in Palestine, that fracture became even more visible. As David Velasco wrote, those events “broke the art world”—not because they created new tensions, but because they exposed existing ones. Long-standing disparities and institutional failures have been laid bare.

Within this context, what kind of art institution do you think Toronto needs today?

For me, the question isn’t whether Toronto needs major institutions—it does—but what kind of institutions can genuinely serve artists and communities today. The models that inspire me are grounded in place. Their relevance comes from sustained relationships with artists on the ground, rather than aspiring to generalized global templates, even as they remain in dialogue with international discourse. Toronto doesn’t need to emulate MoMA or replicate another MOCA. It needs institutions focused on this city, our communities, and the specific conditions shaping them.

That thinking is embedded in the name SITE Toronto. It signals an institution that is grounded rather than aspirational—one that reflects the city as it is and, like still water, holds it clearly enough that we can see ourselves in it. It is about building a nimble, flexible, process-driven structure that remains responsive to changing conditions and to the artists and communities it serves.

I’m thinking about the three-part public program you organized at Mercer Union. Can you tell me more about these sessions?

The program unfolded across three sessions, each combining talks, public conversations, and workshop elements. The first session introduced my research through dialogue with Theresa Wang and Aamna Muzaffar from Mercer and opened into a broader discussion with participants. 

The second session focused on funding models. I invited Sally Moussawi, who joined virtually from the UK and has worked with organizations such as the Mosaic Rooms, not/nowhere collective, and Cubitt Artists. Sally describes their work as developing anti-capitalist approaches to funding not-for-profit arts organizations—language I rarely hear articulated so directly within the sector. Our conversation connected funding conditions in the UK and Canada and was followed by a workshop examining short- and long-term strategies for ethical and sustainable funding models. 

The third session considered how institutions respond to place. Emilie Chhangur, director of the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, joined as the guest speaker. We discussed her institutional approach alongside the work of architect Lina Bo Bardi and the organization SESC in Brazil, particularly its deep integration with the surrounding community. That session also concluded with a workshop.

The format was about knowledge production through exchange—it was also an extension of my individual research, allowing it to live and breathe in dialogue with the community. The conversations and workshops directly shaped the thinking that later informed SITE Toronto as a new kind of arts institution.

I’m curious who attended the sessions and what kinds of conversations emerged.

In terms of who was there, my intention was to cast a wide net. Initially, I had intended to bring in people who were not just visual artists or arts workers. I was inspired by Park Fiction in Hamburg in the 1990s, where artists mobilized a broad-section of the community—café owners, children, elderly folks, creatives, tenant class—to prevent a park from being turned into apartments. I thought this program might start that way, but after the first session it became clear that the people most invested in these questions were arts workers. For me, an arts worker is defined as anyone whose livelihood comes from the arts sector. The term “worker” is inherently connected to labour, so it includes artists as well—anyone primarily sustaining themselves through the arts.

The majority of people who showed up were those impacted directly by arts institutions through their work—people who had worked in institutions or on institutional projects in Toronto, also public and private funders, foundations, private donors, and people from the city. There were individuals in their seventies and sixties alongside people in their early twenties. Bringing those cross-generational perspectives into the same conversation was incredibly valuable.

 

 

 

The word “community” is used constantly—and I care about it deeply—but within contemporary arts institutions it has become diluted. For now, I’m focusing on the sector itself: labour, funding, sustainability, censorship, and equity. These are the conditions that determine whether arts workers can build and sustain careers in Toronto.

 

 

 

I appreciate that you invite the local community to contribute their thoughts. Could you share a few examples of what participants brought up during the sessions?

Participants broke into small groups with large sheets of paper to brainstorm. One prompt asked what felt urgent, missing, or overlooked within Toronto’s arts institutions. Some responses were emotional or conceptual; others were concrete and data-driven—for example, the need for rent support, the desire for protected spaces for art, and references to city polling showing declining public support for funding art and culture. Each group then presented their key points, and we mapped them collectively in a live format.

We also discussed the tools needed to address what’s lacking: fewer barriers to entry, less siloing, art more embedded in daily life, and institutions that say “yes” rather than defaulting to “no.” People spoke about reducing alienation, increasing public buy-in, creating more opportunities for exchange, and dismantling hierarchical or colonial structures. Some proposals were practical, such as free access and eliminating ticketing.

What I’ve been thinking about since is how to sustain that momentum beyond the workshops. It felt like a beginning. I believe we need to band together more deliberately as an arts sector. The word “community” is used constantly—and I care about it deeply—but within contemporary arts institutions it has become diluted. For now, I’m focusing on the sector itself: labour, funding, sustainability, censorship, and equity. These are the conditions that determine whether arts workers can build and sustain careers in Toronto.

These conversations are happening, but often in silos. Change happens when people organize, come together, and articulate shared interests. That was the intention behind the program, and it’s what I hope to continue through SITE Toronto.

Can you elaborate on your intention in organizing the program?

One thing I was very conscious of when developing the program was that it wasn’t about what I think arts institutions should be. I don't think there is a definitive answer. I was interested in creating a format where knowledge could be produced collectively and through exchange. I have my perspective, but it was really about learning through other people's opinions and experience. In that sense, I very much welcome debate. I wanted critique, I wanted people to be critical of my approach, because I'd been working on these questions alone. And that's also a very crucial way that I like to work as a curator. It's a relational process for me, and it's about working in collaboration and dialogue with other people. This is how I wanted this program to function. 

What do you hope participants take away from the program?

The questions we explored in the program are already very much alive in Toronto. Many people are thinking about and building new ways of working, often through collaboration and pooled resources. What I hoped was to learn from others, and for the sessions to function connectively—to bring together conversations more intentionally across the sector, so artists and organizations working in parallel might recognize shared interests and begin working together more often and deliberately.

I also hope participants left with an expanded sense of what constitutes contemporary art in this city! Too often, disciplines are treated as separate—visual art here, performance there, music somewhere else—when in reality they are part of the same contemporary moment.

For me, expanding this understanding of what contemporary art is creates the conditions for more interdisciplinary exchange and experimentation. When we think of contemporary art as a porous and evolving field rather than a fixed category, it becomes easier to collaborate across forms and to build institutions that reflect how we actually think and work as artists and people. This kind of openness not only fosters creativity but also strengthens and sustains the cultural sector more broadly.

What are some of the upcoming initiatives that SITE Toronto is planning?

SITE Toronto is a new institution for contemporary art—not only because it was recently formed, but because it proposes a new methodology for how an arts institution can function.

At its core, SITE focuses on strengthening the cultural landscape in Toronto by building a just and equitable infrastructure that supports critical inquiry and rigorous creative practice. Toronto is deeply diasporic, yet the arts sector can feel insular. SITE bridges local commitment with international networks and connections.

The first initiative is a residency program launching in March that supports both local and international practitioners. The inaugural session, which runs for three months, will bring an international artist to Toronto while supporting a Toronto-based curator in undertaking research abroad. This reciprocal model is further rooted in Toronto's layered histories, foregrounding questions of land, colonization, migration, and belonging. 

In 2026, we also plan to launch a mentorship program focused on strengthening local networks. Artists and arts workers will be able to share projects in progress, receive feedback, and build professional relationships. The program will also connect participants beyond the city—for example, pairing a Toronto-based curator with someone internationally to foster sustained dialogue.

We are also planning a symposium on institutions in the twenty-first century, with a focus on understanding institutions as processes rather than fixed endpoints. One of the first questions I’m often asked about SITE Toronto is whether we have a space. A physical space is certainly a goal, but it isn’t the starting point. For an institution to meaningfully support artists and remain connected to the community, it must recognize that artists and communities are not static—they are constantly evolving. Institutions, therefore, must be responsive and adaptable.

We are living at a time when many people feel constrained in what they can say publicly, particularly within Toronto’s arts sector. One responsibility of a contemporary arts institution is to create space for discussion and disagreement—for criticality. The language of debate may have receded from our cultural vocabulary, yet it remains essential if we are to live together in this city.

At their best, institutions can serve as spaces of exchange—bringing people into dialogue not through consensus, but through the differences we hold. If they are flexible and responsive, our arts institutions can make room for complexity and contradiction, and in doing so, play an active role in shaping Toronto into the kind of artistic city we have the potential to be.