It took eight months to find a successor to John Zeppetelli, who announced his departure last December. And it is a familiar face from cultural institutions who will replace him in October: Stéphan La Roche.
The news was confirmed by the Secretariat for Senior Employment on Wednesday evening. Stéphan La Roche, who will take up his new duties on October 14, is the current president and CEO of the Musée de la civilisation in Quebec City.
The process leading to the replacement of John Zeppetelli, who led the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (MAC) for 10 years, will have lasted nearly a year. Since the museum is a Crown corporation, the CAQ’s Cabinet had to confirm Mr. La Roche’s appointment, which was done Wednesday by the office of Premier François Legault.
PHOTO MARTIN CHAMBERLAND, LA PRESSE ARCHIVES
John Zeppetelli, current Director General and Chief Curator of the MAC
Stéphan La Roche had indicated last May that he would leave his position as president and CEO at the end of the year. He had been in charge of the Musée de la civilisation since 2015. During his time there, he notably programmed the exhibitions Hergé in Quebec, The time of the pharaohs, Pompeii – Immortal City or the one dedicated to René Lévesque, who helped to relaunch the museum.
Mr. La Roche, who had also previously headed the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec (CALQ), also experienced the ordeal of COVID-19. He told our colleague Mario Girard: “Strangely, this period gave me both negative and positive emotions. We closed and opened three times. You can imagine what that means for the employees. There are projects that never saw the light of day. Our team was so resilient that we came out of it stronger.”
Read the column “Stéphan La Roche leaves the Museum of Civilization”
In the summer of 2021, the Musée de la civilisation had received a mandate from the Legault government to design and produce the Espaces bleus project, a provincial network of 17 museums that was supposed to showcase Quebec’s cultural heritage. But the project, estimated at a prohibitive cost of nearly $1 billion by Minister of Culture Mathieu Lacombe, was ultimately abandoned last March.
The departure of Stéphan La Roche from the Museum of Civilization should speed up the appointment of his or her successor in Quebec.
The new director general and member of the MAC’s board of directors inherits the museum’s enormous transformation project, postponed several times, which finally began last January – with plans by the architectural firms Saucier+Perrotte and GLCRM completed in 2017. The initial cost of the project was 44 million.
The budget for the new MAC, for the same project, is now estimated at more than 121 million, a sum revised upwards for the umpteenth time after the MAC Foundation’s decision to increase its target by 5 million to reach 16.5 million. For the rest, the financial structure remains the same: Quebec finances 55 million of the cost and Ottawa 50 million.
According to MAC board chair Claudie Imbleau-Chagnon, the interior demolition is underway and should be completed by the end of the fall. “The exterior demolition will be launched by the end of September,” she said during a short exchange, “which will make the progress of the transformation much more visible to the general public.”
Tenders for the remaining lots are continuing, she confirmed, a process led by the Société québécoise des infrastructures, which is managing the project.
The MAC’s goal is to double the size of the current building, but the exhibition hall space in the new MAC will only increase by 28%, according to the construction program obtained by The Press thanks to the Act respecting access to documents held by public bodies and the protection of personal information.
The museum is not scheduled to reopen before 2028. In the meantime, the MAC is renting a space at Place Ville Marie (since 2021), where it presents a number of exhibitions. As for its permanent collection, which includes approximately 8,000 works, it is stored in one of the wings of the current building and is therefore not accessible.