John G. Hampton

Executive Director and CEO – Mackenzie Art Gallery
Chickasaw Nation

Artist and Artist and curator John G. Hampton currently resides on Treaty 4 territory, Saskatchewan, where he works as Executive Director and CEO at the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina since 2020. In this role, John became the first Indigenous Director of a major Canadian art gallery. He is also the Adjunct Curator at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto. He holds a Master of Visual Studies - Curatorial Studies from the University of Toronto after graduating in 2014, and he earned a Bachelor of Arts in Visual Arts from the University of Regina in 2009.

A recent project he has been working on at the MacKenzie Art Gallery is called “Conceptions of White”. Expected to be shown in 2022, this exhibit deals with the development, and the starting point of “whiteness” in a North American context.  It will look at the way “whiteness” is held up in a more positive light and used to other or demean other races. With the recent police murders in the United States of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, and the murder of Eishia Hudson in Canada, the killing of people of colour by those who are paid to help them, it has been a sort of wake up call for a lot of people. Hampton is curating this exhibition alongside Lillian O’Brien Davis, the Curatorial Assistant at the MacKenzie Art Gallery, and with support from Barbara Fischer the Executive Director and Chief Curator at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto.