Young Canada Works. Despite its faults*, it’s a beautiful initiative: government funding for cultural heritage organizations to give summer employment to students and new professionals. Here’s a selection of arts-related YCW positions across Canada, from curation and conservation to research and events planning (with varying application deadlines):
Registration / Conservation Assistant at the Vancouver Art Gallery (Vancouver, June 9 – August 29, $21.20/hr)
Curatorial Assistant at the Delta Museum and Archives Society (Delta, BC, May 27 – August 23, $14.10/hr)
Collections Management and Curatorial Research Intern at Gallery 1C03 (Winnipeg, starts May 20, $15.14/hr)
Curatorial Assistant in Copyright Research, Photography, and Art Museum Tours at the RiverBrink Art Museum (Queenston, ON, June 3 – September 1, $12/hr)
Visitor Services Offer at the Museum of Inuit Art (Toronto, 16 weeks, $11/hr)
Student Archival Project Assistant at the McGill University Music Library (Montreal, May 5 – August 1, $12.36/hr)
Student Assistant at the Canadian Architecture Collection at the McGill University Library (Montreal, 13 weeks, $12.36/hr)
Gallery and Events Assistant at the Cape Breton University Art Gallery (Cape Breton, June 16 – August 29, $11.50/hr)
* Faults: Low pay, short contracts, administrative difficulties for participating institutions, and plenty of restrictions on eligibility for both institutions and participants.
The restrictions for the summer-jobs program are here: be under 30 years of age, be in between full-time post-secondary semesters. Here’s the master-list of job postings, if you’d like to search by location (there are many other curatorial positions in museums and archives, if you’re okay with a history/anthropology focus).
Alternatively, the Internships for Graduates program restrictions are here: be under 30, have graduated within the last 24 months, and be otherwise unemployed or underemployed. And here are the job-postings for this qualification: many start later in the year, if you’re like me and don’t plan to graduate until August.