The Vancouver Art Gallery has just appointed local writer and grunt gallery curator Tarah Hogue as its first senior curatorial fellow focusing on indigenous art.

Hogue, who is of Métis/French Canadian and Dutch ancestry, is set to start the new job in September.

The VAG launched the new fellowship to bring more diverse perspectives to its curatorial team, and to "examine and re-contextualize the colonial legacy of the institution", it said in the press announcement today.

Hogue was born in Red Deer and holds a bachelor of art history degree from Queen’s University as well as a master of art history degree in critical curatorial studies from UBC. She's been curator at the grunt since 2014.

Some of her recent curatorial projects have included #callresponse, a series of locally responsive art commissions centering on indigenous women and artists accompanied by a touring exhibition; last year's Unsettled Sites, a group exhibition at SFU Gallery; and Cutting Copper: Indigenous Resurgent Practice, a collaboration between grunt gallery and the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery.

Hogue also served as 2016's a co-organizer of Intertextual: Art in Dialogue, a roving reading group series, and What’s at Stake? Intertextual Indigenous Knowledges, talks, panels, and a spoken-word performances that examined knowledge, power, authority and sovereignty in the construction of artistic practices.

Tarah Hogue was the 2016 Audain Aboriginal Curatorial Fellow at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, and she was a cofounder of the Gam Gallery. As a writer, she has also contributed to several publications, including BlackFlash Magazine, Canadian Art, Decoy Magazine, Inuit Art Quarterly and MICE Magazine.