Collection On View

Samuel Morse, Gallery of the Louvre, 1831-1833

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

Gallery Installation

1/20/2011 – 1/30/2013
Milwaukee Art Museum
Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Three works of art from the Terra Foundation for American Art: Charles Prendergast's carved Chest (1920), and the panel Four Figures and Donkey with Basket of Flowers (c.1915–1917), and a Charles and Maurice Prendergast frame Dreamworld (1908) are on view at the Milwaukee Art Museum. This loan and grant developed from the Terra Foundation of American Art's strategic plan to place fragile works of art on view in partner museums.

To Make a World: George Ault and 1940s America

3/11/2011 – 9/5/2011
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Washington, DC

10/8/2011 – 12/31/2011
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
Kansas City, Missouri

2/18/2012 – 4/16/2012
Georgia Museum of Art
Athens, Georgia

To Make a World captures a 1940s America that was rendered fragile by the Great Depression and made anxious by a global conflict. Although much has been written about the glorious triumph of the Second World War, what has dimmed over time are memories of the anxious tenor of life on the home front, when the country was far distant from the battlefields and yet profoundly at risk. The exhibition centers on five paintings Ault made between 1943 and 1948 depicting the crossroads of Russell's Corners in Woodstock, N.Y. The additional twenty-two artists represented in this exhibition include some as celebrated as Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth, while others are scarcely known to today's art audiences. Taken together, their artworks reveal an aesthetic vein running through 1940s American art that previously has not been identified. From their remote corners of the country, these artists conveyed a still quietude that seems filled with potentialities. The Terra Foundation's Dawn in Pennsylvania by Edward Hopper is included in the exhibition.

Expanded Galleries of American Art

4/1/2005 – Present
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

The Weir Family, 1820-1920: Expanding the Traditions of American Art

11/17/2011 – 5/19/2012
Museum of Art, Brigham Young University
Provo, Utah

6/30/2012 – 9/30/2012
New Britain Museum of American Art
New Britain, Connecticut

10/20/2012 – 1/20/2013
Mint Museum
Charlotte, North Carolina

The Weir Family, 1820-1920: Expanding the Traditions of American Art, organized by the Brigham Young University Museum of Art, will be the first major exhibition to collectively examine paintings by Robert Walter Weir (1803-1889), John Ferguson Weir (1841-1926), and Julian Alden Weir (1851-1919). The exhibition will explore how the transatlantic encounters of the Weir family of artists helped to shape American art for nearly a century. Julian Alden Weir's The Christmas Tree, 1890 is on loan from the Terra Foundation.

Encounters with American Art: Thomas Cole

1/14/2012 – 4/16/2012
Musée du Louvre
Paris, France

5/12/2012 – 8/13/2012
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art
Bentonville, Arkansas

9/22/2012 – 1/6/2013
High Museum of Art
Atlanta, Georgia

Over the next five years the High Museum of Art (Atlanta, Georgia); Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, Arkansas); Musée du Louvre (Paris, France); and the Terra Foundation for American Art (Chicago, Illinois, and Paris, France) will partner to organize a series of small, annual presentations of American art. The first in the series will focus on Thomas Cole and will feature one painting by Asher B. Durand and four by Cole, including The Cross in the Wilderness, one of the few works of American art in the Musée du Louvre collection.

Da Hopper a Warhol. Pittura Americana del XX secolo a San Marino

1/21/2012 – 6/3/2012
Palazzo S.U.M.S.
Repubblica di San Marino, Italy

The purpose of the exhibition is to provide the general public with an overview of art history ranging from the mid 15^th to the 20^th century. There will be concurrent exhibitions in Rimini and San Marino. The exhibition is San Marino is devoted to Twentieth century American Art and will include 25 works by Hopper, Rothko, De Kooning, Still, Pollock, Wyeth, O'Keeffe, Warhol, Kline, Gorky from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and the Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, Connecticut. The second exhibition with 75 works of art will look at European art from the 15^th to 20 centuries from Italy, Germany, Spain and The Netherlands.

The Art of Golf

2/4/2012 – 6/3/2012
High Museum of Art
Atlanta, Georgia

The exhibition will examine the depiction of golf through the ages, from the seventeenth century to the present day. Consisting of approximately 90 works, the exhibition will examine the game's early antecedents in The Netherlands to its foundations in Scotland and its growth in America in the twentieth century. The exhibition will include many works from the National Galleries of Scotland in addition to an interactive component and large-scale contemporary photography.

Gallery Installation

2/18/2011 – 12/31/2012
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

The extended loan of the Terra Foundation's painting Highway by George Tooker will enhance an installation of artists such as Gertrude Abercrombie, George Ault, Kurt Seligman, Honoré Sharrer, Yves Tanguy, Dorothea Tanning, John Wilde, and Andrew Wyeth belonging to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. The opportunity to develop additional programming as the result of the Tooker loan allows PAFA to pursue a symposium on a group of artists, including Peter Blume, George Tooker, Ivan Albright, and other Americans who used a realist method to invent their own worlds by transforming the symbolic language of Old Master painting into a contemporary idiom. These artists' works gravitated towards the uncanny and were often called "magic realists."

A New Look: Samuel F.B. Morse's Gallery of the Louvre, 1831–1833

7/3/2011 – 7/8/2012
National Gallery of Art
Washington, DC

8/1/2012 – 4/30/2013
The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Samuel F.B. Morse's iconic, newly conserved painting Gallery of the Louvre (1831–1833) is on loan from the Terra Foundation of American Art. Executed in Paris and New York, the painting is Morse's "gallery picture"—a genre first popularized in the seventeenth century—and this is the only major example in the history of American art. It depicts his own imaginative installation of masterworks from the Louvre's Salon Carré with copyists and instructors in the foreground. Morse—who also invented Morse code and the telegraph—intended the work to inspire and inform American audiences by emphasizing the importance of instruction and learning from masterpieces.

Americans in Florence: Sargent and the American Impressionists

3/2/2012 – 7/15/2012
Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi
Florence, Italy

The exhibition explores the American impressionists' relationship with Italy, and with Florence in particular, in the decades spanning the close of the nineteenth and dawn of the twentieth centuries. There was a marked upswing in the number of American artists travelling to Europe after the Civil War ended in 1865, and the trend continued on into the early twentieth century. Hundreds of painters came to Paris and other parts of France while others studied in Germany; England, Holland, and Spain were other favourite locations. Italy, however, was an inescapable pole of attraction for most of them. Florence, Venice, and Rome had been at the heart of the Grand Tour for centuries and had become legendary for all those eager to study the art of the past, quite apart from their appeal in terms of the climate, the countryside, the people, and the overall atmosphere prevailing in them. Five paintings from the Terra Collection are included in the exhibition.

A Will of Their Own: Judith Murray and Women of Achievement in the Early Republic

4/20/2012 – 9/2/2013
National Portrait Gallery
Washington, D.C.

Centered around the 18-month loan of Judith Murray by John Singleton Copley, a c. 1769 oil painting owned by the Terra Foundation for American Art (TFAA), this exhibition will bring together an additional seven portraits of prominent American women from the late eighteenth century to showcase the important achievements of women during this period and the early efforts to gain gender equality in America. Through the exhibition, accompanying educational programming and symposium, the Portrait Gallery will focus attention on a remarkable group of women and add to the understanding about the contested nature of gender during this period.