Executive Director/Chief Curator, Art Museum at the University of Toronto; Associate Professor, Teaching Stream, Master of Visual Studies - Curatorial Studies Program at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design at the University of Toronto, Ontario
Barbara Fischer is the Executive Director/Chief Curator of the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery|University of Toronto Art Centre as well as Associate Professor, Teaching Stream, in the Master of Visual Studies- Curatorial Studies Program at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design at the University of Toronto.
Previous positions include Curator, Open Space Gallery (Victoria, BC); Assistant Curator, Walter Phillips Gallery (Banff); Assistant Curator, Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto); Curator, The Power Plant (Toronto), and Director/Curator of the Blackwood Gallery (University of Toronto at Mississauga, 1999 to 2005).
She has curated and written catalogue essays for solo exhibitions of, among others, FASTWÜRMS, Stan Douglas, John Greyson, Tanya Mars, Alain Paiement, Daniel Olson, Michael Fernandes, Kelly Mark, Euan Macdonald, Rebecca Belmore, Mark Lewis, Will Kwan, Ron Terada, Kevin Schmidt, as well as the internationally circulating retrospective exhibition General Idea Editions 1967-1995 (Kunstverein Munich, Kunstverein Zurich, Kunst-Werke ICA Berlin, CAAC Seville, Henry Art Gallery Seattle, and the Andy Warhol Museum Pittsburgh, among others). Fischer curated major group exhibitions of Canadian and international artists such as Social Space (1984), Signs (1988), Re-enactment (1990), Love Gasoline (1996), Foodculture (1997), spilled edge soft corners (1999), New Modular (2002), as well as Logo-city (2000) and Projections (2007), the first major survey (and touring exhibition) on projection-based works in the history of contemporary art in Canada. She co-curated the major, multi-venue circulating exhibitions Soundtracks (2003) and Make Believe (2006) with Catherine Crowston. She was appointed commissioner and curator of Mark Lewis’ project of the Canadian Pavilion for the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009. Most recently, she partnered with four Canadian institutions to produce the first ever survey of conceptual art in Canada (Traffic: Conceptual Art in Canada 1965-1980) which premiered at the University of Toronto Galleries in the fall of 2010.
In addition to receiving a number of OAAG Exhibition of the Year awards [logo-city, 2000; soundtracks 2003 (co-curated with Catherine Crowston); Projections 2007], she was the recipient of the 2001 Curatorial Writing Award in the Historical category (Love Gasoline); the 2004 Melva J. Dwyer Award for Excellence in Canadian Publishing from ARLIS (General Idea Editions); and the 2008 Hnatyshyn Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art.