Contact Us
1-800-558-0119
Where Moulding Meets Mission
Community · Trade Stories
Inside ValCo Ornate Frames' apprenticeship at The Peale Museum, Baltimore — where working artists are learning to build their own frames from White River profiles.
When Val Schaefer of ValCo Ornate Frames reached out earlier this year, the ask was different from most we get. He wasn't quoting a project. He was teaching one — and he needed material.
Val runs a framing apprenticeship at The Guild at The Peale, the historic Baltimore museum reborn as a community arts space. The program brings working artists into the craft of ornate framing — not as a service to outsource, but as something they learn to do themselves, on their own art.
He needed real moulding. The kind a young artist could cut into, stain, glaze, gild, and ultimately make their own.
We sent it.
The work, in their hands
What these photos show isn't a demo. It's apprentices building real frames for real artwork that will hang in Baltimore's biggest arts festival this weekend.
"The apprentices have moved from selecting raw White River profiles and testing combinations into active construction, fitting, staining, painting, glazing, and detailing. You can really see individual design choices starting to emerge now. Some are leaning darker and more dramatic. Others are pushing into softer combinations. The work is becoming much more personal."
Val Schaefer · ValCo Ornate FramesThe schedule was doubled — from one session a week to two — to give the apprentices enough bench time to finish frames in time for Artscape, Baltimore's largest free arts festival. Frames are coming together fast.
The frame as part of the artwork
The line in Val's note we keep coming back to:
"The moulding is not just material. It is becoming part of the artwork's voice."
Val Schaefer · ValCo Ornate FramesThat's the shift every designer, framer, and architect we work with eventually makes — and watching it happen with emerging artists is something else. They're not picking a frame to "go around" a painting. They're making real choices about proportion, color, mood, and how the frame will shape the viewer's first impression.
Some apprentices are leaning into dramatic, heavy gold finishes — high-relief acanthus, deep ornamental bands, full gilding. Others are choosing quieter profiles and softer glazes. The same catalog. Completely different voices.
A workshop in The Peale's courtyard
Most of the building happens outside — under a pop-up tent in the courtyard of The Peale itself, beneath the historic relief sculpture on the museum's brick rotunda. A DeWalt miter saw on a portable stand, a small air compressor, café tables converted into work surfaces. It's not a fabrication shop. It's a museum lawn that became one.
Which feels right. Ornate framing is centuries old. Doing it on the grounds of America's first museum building, with a 19th-century sculptural relief watching over the bench, is exactly the kind of context the work deserves.
Why residential moulding works here
Most of the White River catalog is built for architectural millwork — interiors, mantels, panel walls, ceilings. Seeing those same profiles cut down into frames is a reminder of something we believe but don't get to show often enough: a well-drawn profile is a well-drawn profile. Scale changes. Proportion changes. The integrity of the carving doesn't.
The apprentices are using residential mouldings naturally — reaching for high-relief ornaments where a piece calls for richness, choosing clean traditional profiles where the artwork wants quiet. The catalog gave them range. They're using all of it.
On to Artscape
The finished frames are heading to Artscape this weekend — the largest free arts festival in the United States, held annually in Baltimore. The apprentices' artwork will be on view, framed in custom ornate millwork they designed and built themselves.
For several of them, this is the first time a piece of their art will be shown framed in something they made.
That's the part we're proudest to have played a small role in. Not the framing. The first time.
About ValCo Ornate Frames
ValCo Ornate Frames builds custom ornate framing for galleries, collectors, and institutions — and through the apprenticeship at The Guild at The Peale, brings the craft to working artists who might otherwise never have access to it.
Contact Val Schaefer at Val@ValCoOrnateFrames.com.
To learn more about The Peale — Baltimore's first museum, founded in 1814 and now reopened as a community arts hub — visit thepeale.org.
Dejar un comentario