Enfilade

From the press release (1 December 2023). . .

Italian Tabernacle Frame, 1600s, tortoiseshell, bone or ivory, and wood. (Toronto: AGO, gift from a private collector, 94/994).

The Decorative Arts Trust is pleased to announce that the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in Toronto, Canada, will serve as our 2024–26 Curatorial Internship Grant partner. The Decorative Arts Trust underwrites curatorial internships for recent Masters or PhD graduates in collaboration with museums and historical societies. These internships allow host organizations to hire a deserving professional who will learn about the responsibilities and duties common to the curatorial field while working alongside a talented mentor.

This intern will focus on a type of material culture that links the decorative and fine arts: frames. The AGO is home to one of the largest collections of historic frames in the world, currently amounting to well over 1,200 examples. The collection is expansive in terms of both chronology and geography, ranging from the late 1400s to the early 1990s, and with fine frames from France, England, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, the Americas, and Asia. The AGO’s goals are twofold: to study the history of frame making to preserve knowledge at a moment when most experts in the field are currently retiring; and to pair paintings and frames to show artwork within a surround that was made in the same region and time period.

Under the mentorship of Caroline Shields, Curator, European Art, and Adam Harris Levine, Associate Curator, European Art, the intern will research and catalogue the AGO’s holdings and assist in making the collection available to the public online. They will work to pair paintings with frames that are chronologically and geographically suited, and they will facilitate the loan of frames to peer museums. The intern’s term will begin in May 2024, when the AGO hosts an international conference, Many Lives: Picture Frames in Context, featuring keynote speakers Hubert Baija, Senior Frames Conservator, and Lynn Roberts, Frame Historian. As part of their tenure at the AGO, the intern will help prepare the conference papers for a digital publication.

A formal call for applications for the internship will be posted early in 2024. Current and recent graduate students who are interested in this opening are encouraged to visit AGO’s website at ago.ca for updates.