Marc Mayer

Marc Mayer is a writer, curator, and exhibition programmer based in New York City. He is currently the Director of Arsenal Contemporary Art, New York, a private gallery that specializes in the promotion of contemporary Canadian art. Known for his intellectual breadth and institutional leadership, Mayer has held prominent positions in several institutions in North America. From 2009 to 2019, he served as Director and CEO of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, where he oversaw major acquisitions, exhibitions, and strategic transformations. Prior to that, he was Directeur général of the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2004–2009), Deputy Director for Art at the Brooklyn Museum, Director of The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto, and Curator at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo.

Mayer holds a BA with Honours in Art History from McGill University (1984). Over the course of his career, he has organized a wide range of ambitious exhibitions, including Edward Burtynsky: Abstraction/Extraction at the Saatchi Gallery, Jack Bush: A Retrospective and Thomas Nozkowski: Paintings for the National Gallery of Canada, Jean-Michel Basquiat at the Brooklyn Museum, and Being and Time: The Emergence of Video Projection at the Albright-Knox.

He is a long-time advocate for contemporary art. Mayer has written extensively on the work of Edward Burtynsky over the years. He maintains two publications on Substack: Ekphrasis, where his essays contribute to the evolving discourse on art in a personal voice; and Friction, a wide-ranging dialogue on art with Claude AI.