Barbara Fischer (born November 4, 1956) is an art curator and writer who specializes in contemporary art in all media with an emphasis on sculpture, installation, and projection/lens-based work. The Toronto Star called her the "unassuming nuclear reactor of the Toronto arts scene", adding that she is "doing seemingly impossible work that, at the same time, is both vital and otherwise neglected: building a memory bank of artistic expression in a city plagued with willful amnesia."
Career
Fischer was born in Karlsruhe, Germany, the eldest of ten children and attended the Rudolf Steiner School, Bochum-Langendreer, Germany. She moved to Canada in 1976 and studied at the Banff School of Fine Arts Summer school. She received her BFA, University of Victoria (1982) and her MA from York University (1999).
Fischer changed curatorial positions every two or three years in the early part of her career. She was the curator of film and visual arts at the Open Space Gallery in Victoria, BC (1981–1983), assistant curator at the Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff, AB (1983–1985), assistant curator of contemporary Canadian and international art at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (1985–1988), and curator of contemporary art at The Power Plant, Toronto (1988–1990). From 1999 to 2002, she was the curator of the Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto at Mississauga, Toronto and from 2002 to 2005 its director/curator.
She became director/curator of the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery (2005–2014), which along with the University of Toronto Art Centre, is part of the Art Museum of Toronto, then interim director at the Art Centre (2013–2014) and from 2014 to 2016, its executive director/chief curator. In 2016, she became director of the Art Museum. At the same time as her curatorial work, Fischer taught at the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD) in Toronto (1992–1998), at the University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario (1995–1999), at the University of Toronto at Mississauga (2000–2005), then in the Department of Art, University of Toronto (2008–2015) and from 2015, as an associate professor, teaching stream in the Master of Visual Studies Program in Curatorial Studies at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto.