The director of a modest art gallery in Winnipeg has made a leap to the National Gallery in Ottawa.

As of December, Steven Loft will be the first aboriginal curator-in-residence at the National Gallery.
 
Loft has been running the Urban Shaman Gallery, an artist-run centre that specializes in work by native artists, since 2002.

Loft said he's "beaming" at the news he has won the position, and believes the leadership role of the Urban Shaman Gallery may have given him an advantage.

There are "amazing things from Manitoba…. We have one of the most vibrant aboriginal arts scenes in the country," he said. 

Loft is the first to win a place in a new program for aboriginal curators in mid-career from the National Gallery and Canada Council.

He congratulated the gallery on creating such a program, and its recent decision to create a position for a curator and a department focusing on indigenous art.

"It speaks to the importance that’s being placed on aboriginal art in the larger Canadian art world, and I think that’s really important and I think what the National Gallery has done is made a very strong statement about that," Loft said.

Loft's career centred on contemporary works

The National Gallery didn't start buying aboriginal work until 1986, he said, but the program proves it has listened to critics who advocated more attention to First Nations work.

"I think it's another demonstration of how the gallery has been opening up over the last few years to aboriginal art," said Greg Hill, the gallery's recently hired curator of indigenous art.

"In the past — we're talking before 1986 — the aboriginal art was basically relegated to museums, and treated as of ethnographic interest and not necessarily as art."

Loft, who will prepare a touring exhibit during his period in residency, is unlikely to want to work with art that seems suited to a history museum.

His career has centred on contemporary First Nations work, and he has curated shows of new media and video art. He also works himself as a video and new media artist.

"I'd really like them to put more work into the collection — I think that's so important," he said, when asked how he would like to see things change at the National Gallery.

"There's so much great work being created by contemporary aboriginal artists and also there's a lot of historical work that I think would really add to the National Gallery's collection, because it has to reflect Canadian art." 

A Six Nations Mohawk born in Hamilton, Loft has been First Nations curator at the Art Gallery of Hamilton and artistic director of the Native Indian/Inuit Photographers' Association.

He begins his residency in December and will stay two years. 

Winnipeg Art Gallery director Pierre Arpin recently announced he will be heading to Ottawa to lead the Canada Council's Visual Arts section.