2026-2027 Academic Year YCBA Bartels Internship: Paintings & Sculpture

Application Deadline: May 1, 2026 at 11:59pm

Department Description:
The Department of Paintings and Sculpture is responsible for a collection of over two thousand paintings and 250 sculptures from the late-medieval to the contemporary periods. Particularly strong in the period from 1720 to 1850, the collection is unrivaled in the depth and comprehensiveness of its representation of painting from this era, especially in telling the stories of portrait, landscape, and sporting art. The YCBA also has the finest group of paintings in North America by George Stubbs, John Constable, and J. M. W. Turner. The collection accepts implicitly the transnational character of British painting and is strong in the art of the British Empire and increasingly in the art of the postcolonial present. Sculpture is represented by outstanding examples of portraits in different media, animalier bronzes, and ideal marbles, as well as important modern and contemporary work by such artists as Dame Rachel Whiteread and Yinka Shonibare CBE RA.
 

Project Description: 

The Paintings and Sculpture department seeks a student to support the development of an exhibition project on the eighteenth-century artist Agostino Brunias (ca. 1730–1796). Born in Rome and brought to England in the 1750s, Brunias spent the latter part of his career in the British Caribbean. During his time in the region, he made some of the most important visual records of the people—Indigenous, free, and enslaved—who inhabited islands of the Lesser Antilles. The YCBA holds the largest collection of works by Brunias and is exploring the possibility of creating an exhibition. This will be informed by technical analysis of the artist’s work and thorough art historical research. The intern will assist the curator in creating a bibliography on the artist and developing a full list of all the works by Brunias that will inform the exhibition checklist. The work will develop the student’s research skills, using archival and digital resources to craft new knowledge about Brunias’s work.