"[3] Angel gained the support of John Fraser, who was the master of Massey College in 2010, the year she began her PhD at the University of Toronto.
[8] Angel continued to build support over the next year and a half, but it was only after she was named a Trudeau Foundation Doctoral Scholar and was awarded a generous grant, which she put towards the fledgling ACI, that the Institute became a reality.
[11] The project is encyclopedic in nature and meant for a general audience, with authors who include art historians and curators from across Canada, contributing original scholarship that addresses subjective topics such as an artist's significance.
[21] Another way that the ACI fulfills its mandate to make "Canadian art history a contemporary conversation,"[18] is through its series of public lectures.
Previous talks have focused on diverse topics, such as the lives and legacies of Canadian women artists and the subject of art fraud in Canada.
[22] At an ACI Public Talk in 2021, the artist Kent Monkman spoke for the first time in a live interview about the production of the monumental diptych, mistikôsiwak (Wooden Boat People), commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art,[23][24] and how the work relates to that museum's North American Indigenous, American, and European art collections, “including challenging such works as the iconic 1851 painting Washington Crossing the Delaware by German-American artist Emanuel Leutze.”[25] Created to complement ACI's Canadian Online Art Book Project, The Canadian Schools Art Education Program provides expert-authored teacher resource guides for primary and secondary school educators to facilitate the study of a wide range of subjects through the work of Canadian artists.
ACI has published over 50 guides to date, including resources on Kazuo Nakamura and mathematical concepts, developed in partnership with the teacher-based initiative The Art of Math; Iljuwas Bill Reid and ways of knowing; Prudence Heward and early 20th-century women; and Canadian artists and climate change, developed in partnership with the educational non-profit Green Learning.
As stated in Canadian Teacher Magazine, Students in Grades 7 through 12 are invited to create original artworks in any medium inspired by the nation's leading artists.