ROM director and CEO Josh Basseches.DUANE COLE/The Globe and Mail
Sitting down for a final media interview as director of the Royal Ontario Museum, Josh Basseches is excited about – what else? – dinosaurs. After a brief November closure, the ROM has reopened its dinosaur gallery in time for the holidays with more space, more specimens and more light. The reconfiguration of the second floor gallery is part of the larger OpenROM project, a $130-million renovation of the Bloor Street entrance that will totally redo the ground floor, adding a space for performances and a café, while giving the public free access to the First Nations, China and Korea galleries.
“It’s really a vision of a ferment, engagement, achieving a spirit where people say: ‘This is my place. And I feel comfortable when I hang out there,’” Basseches said, explaining that access and affordability were among the project’s main goals.
Basseches leaves the ROM Dec. 31 after 10 years as director in what has often been a mop-up operation: launching an expensive correction of the obvious mistakes made by the $240-million Crystal expansion project that opened in 2007 and then shepherding the museum through COVID-19 recovery. But a fixation on what the building requires to be more hospitable to the public and budget deficits only exacerbated by the pandemic have left little room to consider what kind of programming the ROM needs if it is to live up to its claims to be a museum for the 21st century.
Basseches said the museum still carries about $18.5-million in debt from the Crystal project, a manageable amount it is gradually paying down. The ROM intends to fund the current project entirely through private philanthropy without debt.
Royal Ontario Museum CEO Josh Basseches to depart at end of 2025
What is more worrying are the ongoing budget deficits that predate COVID-19. Although the ROM had showed surpluses in three of the four years prior to the pandemic it still had a $15-million accumulated deficit on its operating budget at the end of its fiscal year in 2020. This past fiscal year was the first since then that the museum registered a surplus, $4.1-million, and could start paying down a net deficit on its operating fund, which now stands at $45.5-million.
The pandemic dealt a bad blow to museums across the country; they are capital intensive institutions that could at best lay off box-office and security staff. The ROM took federal relief money to cover wages, but the Canada Revenue Agency is now demanding $13.4-million back, arguing the museum is owned by the province of Ontario and so wasn’t eligible. The ROM has appealed, saying it is controlled by the province (which appoints its board) but not owned, and is confident it will prevail in a case at the Tax Court of Canada.
Meanwhile, recovery is an imperfect thing across the whole sector: Basseches estimates that the best attendance numbers most North American museums can report are 95 per cent of prepandemic numbers, and that still leaves a hole in the budget. (The American Alliance of Museums has found that more than half of its members have not returned to prepandemic numbers with a median attendance of 81 per cent. Comparable Canadian figures will be available in 2026.)
“One of the things that COVID did, was it changed cultural consumption behaviours. People found themselves very comfortable sitting on their couch and watching Netflix,” he said, explaining lower numbers. “We’ve acknowledged our goal is to have meaningful and strong attendance: We are no longer measuring ourselves against pre-COVID times.”
ROM’s attendance stands at 1.1-million for 2024-25, making it the most-visited museum in the country. In 2016, thanks to an exhibition about whales and Dale Chihuly’s glass sculptures, it hit a high water mark of 1.35 million, but it has never sustained the levels the 2007 Crystal project was supposed to deliver. Almost half the ROM’s $86-million budget is covered by the province of Ontario, but it has to raise the other portion itself. It sold $15-million worth of admission tickets in 2024-25: The museum estimates it would cost $25-million a year to make the entire site free.
In this difficult financial situation, perhaps it’s not surprising that Basseches has resorted to highly commercial touring exhibitions. In 2022, Fantastic Beasts: The Wonder of Nature looked at the real animals behind the fictional creatures in the Warner Brother’s Harry Potter-spinoff franchise. Last year, Earth: An Immersive Journey promised HD effects and scents in its recreation of five ecosystems. The current Sharks show is being toured by the American Museum of Natural History and features footage from the Discovery Channel’s Shark Week. At least last winter’s Auschwitz: Not long ago, not far away rose to the standard Basseches sets himself: “The ROM’s mission is to help people understand the past, make sense of the present and come together to shape a shared future.”
Positioning a museum for the future is not an easy job these days, as curators are forced to recognize they are no longer the exclusive experts.
“Our responsibility is to ensure that an institution like ROM is a place of welcome and inclusion for all and so having many different perspectives reflected in what we do, understanding the colonial roots of the institution and what that means to different communities, these are pieces that are central to the work,” Basseches said.
On that score, the ROM was forced to shut its First Nations gallery in 2022 to undertake a rapid update of displays that still featured dioramas with mannequins. Although the gallery had been updated with Indigenous consultation in 2018, it became an embarrassment during a period when Cree artist Kent Monkman was working in the museum on a show of paintings partly inspired by ROM artifacts and specimens.
The next stage of the OpenROM project has yet to be unveiled but it is supposed to add new galleries – including one devoted to Sikh culture and perhaps expanded displays devoted to recent acquisitions of Judaica – or reopen old ones. Currently, there are no longer galleries devoted to Japan or Islam while the Middle East and South Asian galleries are temporarily closed.
But the oddest gap is the Canada gallery, a space lost in various reshuffles and now tricky to program in a society that increasingly questions colonial history. Similarly, the ROM will face a curatorial challenge when it becomes one of the institutions that will house the Hudson Bay Charter: It must interpret for the public a document that some people consider foundational but that did not acknowledge Indigenous presence when it invoked the legal principle of terra nullius, or nobody’s land.
A third of the management team manager stick-handling these difficult Canadian files has come to the ROM from U.S. institutions: Basseches, who has been criticized internally for this hiring pattern, argues that it can be necessary to turn to international candidates because there are few Canadian museums of comparable size.
Basseches himself, who came to the ROM from the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., became a Canadian citizen two years ago, lives in the Beaches neighbourhood and is planning to stay in Canada as he works on various post-ROM projects.
In the meantime, the museum will be run by interim co-directors Yoke Chung, who used to work at the Ontario Science Centre, and Jennifer Wild, who arrived from the Detroit Institute of Arts in 2018.
The ROM’s recent marketing plays on the theme of immortality, pointing to the endurance of its collections. Whether the institution can live up to that ambitious billing will depend on the next director, who is expected to be named in the new year.