Snapshot

The final year of Loring and Wyle’s life was agonizing in many ways. Frances was barely able to walk or see, and was eventually hospitalized. Florence almost completely slipped into senility while Frances was in the hospital but recovered to take care of her when she returned home. When home she needed to use canes. The canes became an extension of her personality. She’d throw them down the stairwell ahead of her when descending for supper in the basement. They would dance and clatter from step to step before crashing out into the dining room, where she would retrieve them. “When I depart from this world, and want to come back and communicate with you,” she told Florence, “listen for the canes. When you hear them you’ll know it’s me with a message for you.

Excerpt from The Girls: A Biography of Frances Loring
and Florence Wyle by Rebecca Sisler, published 1972

I’ve been researching Frances Loring and Florence Wyle since a 2010 open call for exhibition proposals at the Queer Archives of Canada located in a 3-story, heritage-home building on Isabella Street, Toronto. The exhibition space is in the attic. The archives on the floors below. I wanted to do a séance using typtology, rapping codes as way to communicate with spirits, over the archive. I googled “dead lesbians” and an image of Florence Wyle popped up. I was awarded the Queer Archives show to communicate with Loring and Wyle, proposed an exhibition plan, then found out there was no budget so didn’t do it.

By 2015 my research was focused on Loring and Wyle’s Wills and Last Testament where the The Sculpture Fund is the main clause in both. The bulk of initial research took place in the Library & Archives Special Collections at Art Gallery of Ontario. “The Wills” are referred to a lot but there were no Wills to be seen. Desperate to read the actual documents I got the estate files ordered from the Archives of Ontario. The first step of getting a copy of a will is acquiring the death certificate. You use that certificate and file number to order wills at the Provincial Archives office. It was difficult doing this remotely from Vancouver so I ask Dr. Amy Marshall Furness, Head, Library & Archives at AGO, to be my Toronto delegate. She generously provided time and care acquiring the documents, subsequently including them in the Loring and Wyle fonds.

In 2017 I did a number of events and published an artists’ book which pairs the mirror wills drafted by the artists five years before their deaths in 1963. From March 2018 to August 2019, I worked as a 221A Fellow devoted to fulfilling their Wills by developing The Sculpture Fund. My inquiry into the Loring and Wyle estate deepened with afforded time in the AGO’s Library and Archives and Indigenous + Canadian Art Department, The National Gallery of Canada, The Library and Archives of Canada and a number of museums and gallery across the country.

During the fellowship we borrowed of the Peacock Clock, a 1911 bronze work by Frances Loring, from the AGO collection. The piece is a symbol of the project and was displayed as part of 221A’s publicly accessible research collection, Pollyanna 圖書館 Library, for the duration of fellowship. This is when Georgiana Uhlyarik, Curator, Canadian Art and I got to know one another.

Since then, The Sculpture Fund has been established at AGO, as an endowment in the AGO Foundation and an internally restricted acquisition fund for immediate acquisitions.