NEW YORK, NY.- In a moment when many museums are recalibrating ambitions amid financial uncertainty, a New York frame atelier is offering a quiet but consequential form of support.

Eli Wilner & Company has announced a new round of $100,000 in partial grants through its ongoing frame funding initiative, a program designed to help institutions restore, replicate or otherwise reimagine the frames that shape how art is seen. The funds, to be distributed on a first-come, first-served basis, will be committed to new projects by March 31, 2026.

For museums navigating tightened budgets and rising operational costs, the grant program arrives as both practical assistance and symbolic affirmation. Frames, often treated as peripheral to the artworks they surround, can carry significant historical and interpretive weight. Period-appropriate reframing can restore context to a painting; conservation of an original frame can safeguard fragile gilded surfaces; a carefully researched replica can reunite a work with a visual language lost to time.

Institutions may apply the funds toward historic frame replication, antique frame restoration or even mirror replication projects. Applications are being accepted directly by the company via email, with organizers emphasizing that projects of any scale will be considered.

Submissions have been arriving steadily from museums across the country, reflecting what the firm describes as a broad recognition that framing is not merely decorative but integral to stewardship.

A recent example illustrates the program’s scope. With assistance from the initiative, the New Britain Museum of American Art reframed a painting by Marsden Hartley. For Hartley’s “Maine Islands” (c. 1938), the museum selected a replica of the frame used for Hartley’s “Mt. Katahdin” (1942) in the

collection of the National Gallery of Art. The result was not an ornamental flourish but a curatorial decision, one that aligned the smaller coastal work with the aesthetic vocabulary of a related masterpiece.

Eli Wilner & Company has completed over 15,000 framing projects for private collectors, museums, and institutions including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and The White House. Wilner was honored by the Historic Charleston Foundation with the Samuel Gaillard Stoney Conservation Craftsmanship Award, for their work in historic picture frame conservation. In 2024, Eli Wilner was presented with an Iris Award for Outstanding Dealer of the Year by the Bard Graduate Center in New York City.