Arts & Sciences Magazine

By David Silverberg

It’s easy to identify what thrills Josh Basseches when he tours me through the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto: everything.

On the main floor, we pass a stunning yellow sari made from silk with copper alloy metallic threads. “We have one of the largest sari collections outside India,” says Basseches (GRS’11), the museum’s CEO for the past eight years. Then he points to a porcelain sculpture of Buddha, circa the 14th century. “Some people don’t realize the breadth and depth of collections we have here,” he adds with a glint in his eyes, his arms gesturing from object to object energetically. “Can you tell I get excited by this stuff?”

Brimming with more than 40 galleries and housing more than 18 million artworks, artifacts and specimens, the ROM (as it’s known) is the largest museum in Canada. More than 1.2 million visitors walk through its doors each year. It’s also well known for its striking Bloor Street West façade—a stunning “crystal” structure composed of five interlocking, self-supporting prismatic pieces, designed by the celebrated architect Daniel Libeskind. Managing all the moving parts of this massive institution is a time-consuming and overwhelming challenge, especially with a major renovation project on the horizon.

Basseches, currently completing a PhD in the history of art and architecture at Arts & Sciences, shows me next the interior space near the café where, as part of the renovation, the sloped floor will be leveled and transformed into 20,000 square feet of programmable space for talks, music, dance, and hands-on activities. “We don’t want this to be just a pass-through space. We want it to function, in some ways, like the city’s living room. A gathering space that will be flooded with natural light.”

Washington-born Basseches is describing the cornerstone of the $96 million renovation, dubbed OpenROM, that will be completed in 2027. The revamping includes a water feature wrapping around the front façade that shifts from burbling water in the summer to cracked ice in the winter, a new foyer featuring vital works from the ROM’s collections surrounded by a bronze canopy, an oculus cut into the ceiling to give visitors a view up into the dinosaur gallery, and a massive lily-pad staircase designed to weave together the museum’s three levels.

Basseches then takes me to the museum’s Wild Cats exhibition, which features an array of taxidermic cats in stunning poses as labels reveal the cultural, artistic and biological significance of cats around the world. The exhibition is also an example of the intimate role Basseches plays in what visitors see at the ROM.

“When I saw this exhibition in Paris a few years ago, I knew I wanted to bring it to Toronto,” he says. Despite his many obligations on the business side, Basseches often collaborates with the team responsible for curating exhibitions.

“I knew early in my life that while I love curatorial work—my first job was as an assistant curator—I wanted to do more with museums than solely pursue a curatorial path. My interest has long been in managing and leading museums, and I’ve always loved art and architecture.”

From Harvard to the land of poutine and maple syrup

Growing up in Washington, D.C., Basseches had a family that supported his passion for wandering through places like the National Museum of Natural History, the National Gallery of Art, and The Phillips Collection. “Seeing these remarkable works of art made me think as a kid, ‘Wow, if I can spend my life engaged in dealing with these incredible objects, that sounds pretty good to me,’” he says.

After earning a BA in fine arts and English at Amherst College, he secured an MBA from Harvard Business School (HBS). It was an invaluable learning opportunity, but he often felt a bit out of the mainstream. “Education at HBS then was very focused on the corporate sector, and I was a little unusual because where I wanted to bring my management expertise was to the nonprofit field and particularly to the cultural and museum world.”

He was soon able to ply his passion when he spent three years at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts where he managed exhibition programming. Then a more pressing challenge loomed when he took on the executive director position at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. “I had to consolidate and rebrand the outward face of these various museums that would make up one public institution, including the Museum of Comparative Zoology, the Mineralogical Museum, and the Botanical Museum,” he recalls.

“What I aimed to do was translate the work of exceptional scientists such as Edward O. Wilson and Steven J. Gould into programming that would be interesting to visitors of all ages.”

In 2007, then working as deputy director of the Peabody Essex Museum, he wanted to “get the more content-rich experience that I had chosen not to do early on.” At BU, he studied the relationship between American and French art in the 19th century and earned a master’s degree in the history of art and architecture.

In fact, he hasn’t entirely left BU, as he’s in the final stages of completing his PhD dissertation. “The opportunity to hone my research and scholarly chops has been very helpful in leading a complex team at the ROM that includes scores of scholars and researchers,” he says.

It’s clear he is always learning, hungry to feed his curiosity, and the ROM fed that passion. It was a perfect landing spot for Basseches—and he recognized that when he was offered the job back in 2016, accepting it immediately. “This museum has what I want, which is a mix of very public-facing programming activity, as well as serious and important scholarship and research,” he says.

What he finds especially fulfilling about his job is collaborating with cultural groups whose missions align with the institution’s role in the city. “Working with members of communities to realize a vision, that’s really engaging to me,” he says. “We just announced a new gallery and program related to Sikh art and culture and being deeply involved with donors, curators, and researchers to make this happen, that’s very rewarding.”

Museums may sometimes be known as hubs of ancient artifacts, but Basseches contends the ROM can be more than a home for historical education. While we watch from the second floor as visitors stream into the foyer, he says, “We want not only to be looking to the past but also to the future, and we want to show how ROM can be an institution that speaks ever more meaningfully to our city, to the country, and beyond.”