Seema Hollenberg, the new head of curatorial at the Winnipeg Art Gallery.
Seema Hollenberg, senior exhibitions manager at the National Gallery of Canada, has been appointed the head of curatorial at the Winnipeg Art Gallery. She assumes the position on March 2, 2015. As the head of curatorial, Hollenberg will be responsible for managing the WAG’s collections, which include over 25,000 works, alongside the gallery’s exhibitions and museum services.
Hollenberg, who holds a masters of arts in anthropology from the University of Calgary and a bachelor of interior design from the University of Manitoba, has over 20 years of institutional experience gathered at the NGC, the Royal Ontario Museum and the Glenbow Museum. At these institutions, Hollenberg worked as a senior exhibitions manager and developer, and garnered awards for exhibition development and design.
Recently, Hollenberg managed the NGC’s partnership programs with the WAG and the Art Gallery of Alberta, which, among other projects, brought Janet Cardiff’s Forty-Part Motet and Christian Marclay’s The Clock to the WAG.
Her appointment to the WAG’s curatorial team also builds on her past work as a curator, where her interests focused on Indigenous cultures, particularly First Nations and Inuit communities, and art and sculpture from South Asia. In this work, Hollenberg has collaborated with the Blackfoot-speaking communities of Southern Alberta, and spent a residency with the Blood and Peigan communities. These experiences lend to Hollenberg’s insight into collaborating with Indigenous communities on issues surrounding museum collections acquisitions, display and repatriation.
