Framing Narratives: Renaissance to Modernism

Co-curated by former UTAC Director, Niamh O’Laoghaire and students in the Spring 2013 UTAC Exhibition Course, this curatorial project began with a core set of works drawn from the Malcove, University College and University of Toronto Art Collections, three permanent holdings in the care of UTAC. The works, by major artists within the Western canon range in date from the 1500s to the 1940s.

The objectives were multifold: to explore the meanings of the individual objects, to examine the narratives in the history of western art to which they may contribute, and to show how such narrations intersect and overlap. Above all the emphasize was placed on the process of curation itself, and the apparatus, in this case the gallery, through which art histories are created. For this reason the exhibition is an iterative project evolving over three successive phases:

Works on Paper/Secondary Medium (September 3–October 26)
Landscape (October 29–December 7)
Modernism (January 14–March 8)