Collection On View

Joseph H. Davis, Samuel T. and Mary Vickery, 1834

The Terra Foundation for American Art provides opportunities for interaction with original works of American art for the enjoyment of diverse audiences. It has a selection of artworks from its collection on display at the Art Institute of Chicago and lends objects from its collection to national and international exhibitions that advance scholarship in and the interpretation of American art. To make loan inquiries, please review the foundation's loan request procedures.

In addition, the Terra Foundation's grant program includes support for exhibitions that increase the understanding and enjoyment of American art (recent exhibition grants). The foundation has a particular interest in exhibitions with venues that are outside the United States or in its hometown of Chicago, but also makes grants to exhibitions that encompass multi-national collaboration or that interpret American art within an international context.

Where to See the Collection

John Singer Sargent: Portraits in Praise of Women

5/29/2010 – 12/31/2010
Fenimore Art Museum
Cooperstown, New York

The Fenimore Art Museum presents the first major exhibition on the topic of portraits of women by the well-known American artist John Singer Sargent (1856-1925). The exhibition explores Sargent’s range of styles and depth of characterization in his portraits of society women, as well as his fascination with exotic working-class women of Venice and Capri. The paintings and drawings provide an intimate glimpse into the lives of these women of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Parisian Beggar Girl from the Terra Collection is included in this exhibition.

The American Impressionists in the Garden

3/13/2010 – 9/6/2010
Cheekwood Botanical Garden & Museum of Art
Nashville, Tennesse

10/8/2010 – 1/2/2011
Tampa Museum of Art
Tampa, Florida

2/4/2011 – 5/8/2011
Taft Museum of Art
Cincinnati, Ohio

This exhibition explores the theme of the garden in American art and society of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The exhibition features approximately forty paintings depicting European and American gardens by American Impressionist artists along with four bronze sculptures created by American artists for the garden. Nine paintings from the Terra Collection are included in the exhibition.

Expanded Galleries of American Art

4/1/2005 –
Art Institute of Chicago
Chicago, Illinois

Since April 2005, approximately fifty paintings from the foundation’s collection have been on loan to the Department of American Art at the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC). The collections of the Terra and the Art Institute are located in a new suite of galleries, and together provide one of the nation’s most comprehensive presentations of American art. The foundation’s collection of American works on paper are housed in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the Art Institute. The Art Institute is located at 111 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, Illinois, 60603. Appointments to view works on paper from the Terra collection may be made by calling 312.443.3660 or by emailing pstudy@artic.edu. Paintings on view at the AIC

Paths to Abstraction – 1867 to 1917

6/25/2010 – 9/19/2010
Art Gallery of New South Wales
Sydney, Australia

The exhibition will trace major developments in abstraction in Western art from the “subjectless” compositions of James McNeill Whistler’s Nocturnes of the late 1860s to the fully abstracted geometric forms seen in Patrick Bruce’s Peinture, 1917-18 from the Terra Collection. Situated alongside images by Jean Arp, Piet Mondrian and Pablo Picasso, Peinture with its bright colors and sharply detailed forms enlivens the exhibition’s closing section titled “Frontiers of Abstraction.” A number of American artists including Arthur Dove, Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Marsden Hartley are featured with traditional icons of abstraction--Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet, André Derain, Francis Picabia and Wassily Kandinsky.

Sargent and the Sea

9/12/2009 – 1/3/2010
Corcoran Gallery of Art
Washington, DC

2/14/2010 – 5/23/2010
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Houston, Texas

7/10/2010 – 9/26/2010
Royal Academy of Arts
London, United Kingdom

In Sargent and the Sea, the Corcoran Gallery of Art brings together for the first time more than 80 paintings, watercolors, and drawings depicting seascapes and coastal scenes from the early career of John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), the pre-eminent American expatriate painter of the late 19th century. The Corcoran's masterwork En Route pour la pêche (Setting out to Fish), 1878, will serve as the centerpiece of the exhibition, and will be joined by other works produced during, and inspired by, the artist's summer journeys from his home in Paris to Brittany, Normandy, and Capri, as well as two transatlantic voyages.

Impressionist Gardens

7/31/2010 – 10/17/2010
The National Gallery of Scotland
Edinburgh, Scotland

11/16/2010 – 2/14/2011
Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum
Madrid, Spain

This exhibition will trace the origins of the Impressionist garden, beginning with examples by the great school of early 19th-century flower painters at Lyons and looking at such important precursors as Delacroix and Corot, before moving on to the ambitious central section of the show which will feature many outstanding paintings by the Impressionists themselves. A final section will examine the ‘spread’ of the Impressionist garden in the late 19th and early 20th century. European and American artists will feature in this section and will include Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Gustav Klimt and John Singer Sargent. Three paintings from the Terra collection are included in the exhibition: Mary Cassatt, Summertime, Maurice Prendergast, The Luxembourg Garden, Paris and Charles Coutney Curran, Lotus Lilies.

Dutch Utopia: American Artists in Holland, 1880–1914

9/28/2009 – 1/10/2010
Telfair Museum of Art
Savannah, Georgia

2/5/2009 – 5/2/2010
Taft Museum of Art
Cincinnati, Ohio

4/21/2010 – 8/15/2010
Grand Rapids Art Museum
Grand Rapids, Michigan

9/15/2010 – 1/16/2011
Singer Laren Museum
Laren, The Netherlands

Encompassing over seventy works drawn from public and private collections throughout the United States and Europe, Dutch Utopia: American Artists in Holland, 1880-1914 examines the work of forty-three American painters drawn to Holland during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These artists, responding to the negative aspects of rapid urbanization, established colonies in six communities in the Netherlands: Dordrecht, Egmond, Katwijk, Laren, Rijsoord, and Volendam. With the exception of Dordrecht, all were small, pre-industrial villages. Inspired by their pastoral surroundings as well as the great tradition of seventeenth-century Dutch art and the work of the contemporary Hague School, these American artists created visions of Dutch society underpinned by a nostalgic yearning for a pre-modern way of life. Some of these paintings even alluded to America's own colonial Dutch heritage, exploring shared histories and cultural connections between the two countries.Dutch Utopia: American Artists in Holland, 1880-1914 is organized by the Telfair Museum of Art in association with the Singer Laren Museum.

Edward Hopper

10/15/2009 – 1/24/2010
Palazzo Reale
Milan, Italy

2/23/2010 – 6/23/2010
Fondazione Roma Museo
Rome, Italy

6/25/2010 – 10/17/2010
Fondation de l'Hermitage
Lausanne, Switzerland

For the first time in Italy, Milan and Rome, are set to pay tribute to the entire career of Edward Hopper (1882-1967), the 20th century's most popular and best known American artist, with a major anthological exhibition that is the first of its kind in this country. The exhibition presents more than 160 works, including famous masterpieces such as "Summer Interior" (1909), "Pennsylvania Coal Town" (1947), "Morning Sun" (1952), "Second Story Sunlight" (1960), "A Woman in the Sun" (1961) and various paintings that have never been exhibited, like the stunning "Girlie Show" (1941). It explores the whole of Hopper's oeuvre, and all the techniques used by an artist now viewed as one of the classic painters of the twentieth century.

The exhibition is organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York and Artemisia Group, Milan, Italy.