In Traces of Care in the Archive, Dr. Maria Meindl uncovers traces of her mother—a typist employed at the Art Gallery of Ontario in the 1970s—within letters, memos, and planning documents from that period. Her mother’s work coincided with the AGO’s major expansion, including the creation of the brutalist Henry Moore Gallery dedicated to the British sculptor. Within these papers, Meindl encounters the quiet presence of clerical labour: essential, sometimes invisible, yet deeply embedded in the institution’s history.
To follow these traces, Meindl had to learn a ‘lost’ language—the shorthand and initials of office communication, the phrasing of phone messages. Through these details, she reconstructs a professional world where precision, care, and repetition formed a complex choreography of unseen work.
As she revisits these documents, questions arise: whose labour is preserved in the archive, and whose is effaced?
Blending archival research and personal reflection, Traces of Care in the Archive asks how we might recognize the artistry within administration—and recover the humanity within the bureaucratic record.
