Maia Sutnik joined the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1967 and held many positions at the AGO, including in the Department of Photographic Resources in the 1970s.
11 Facts About Maia-Mari Sutnik
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Maia-Mari Sutnik initiated acquisitions such as Arnold Newman's Henry Moore, Much Hadham, England in 1977 to complement the AGO's collection of Henry Moore sculptures.
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Maia-Mari Sutnik was inspired in her collecting policies by her mentor and personal hero, Sam Wagstaff, who was a "generalist" - that is, one who accepts all intended uses of photography, In 2000, the Curatorial Department of Photography was established in the AGO and she was made the Curator.
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Maia-Mari Sutnik worked as a historian of photography, not just as an art historian, so that she always sought to look at the photograph, and if possible, the negative itself, to unearth the date of the work.
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Maia-Mari Sutnik organized the show Eisenstaedt: Two Visions, produced in conjunction with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston exhibition Ansel Adams.
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Maia-Mari Sutnik organized the exhibition Josef Sudek: The Legacy of a Deeper Vision and both edited, curated and wrote for the book of the same title from Hirmer Verlag, Munich, distributed by University of Chicago Press, in 2012.
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Maia-Mari Sutnik has contributed to many publications, including international editions of Contemporary Photographers and Contemporary Masterpieces, and for Imaging a Shattering Earth: Contemporary Photography and the Environmental Debate.
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Since 2005, as well as working at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Maia-Mari Sutnik held an adjunct position at Toronto Metropolitan University, Image Arts Graduate Program - Photographic Preservation and Collections Management.
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Maia-Mari Sutnik semi-retired from the AGO in 2015 to become Curator Emeritus of Photography at the Art Gallery of Ontario, but continued working at the gallery to catalogue an acquisition of photographs by Diane Arbus.
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Maia-Mari Sutnik was appointed as a Member of the Order of Canada in 2023.
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In 2014, a show of her collection titled Curious Anarchy: The Photographic Collection of Maia-Mari Sutnik was held at the Image Centre, Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto.