Grants Awarded
Theodore Robinson, The Wedding March, 1892
Through projects realized with the support of Terra Foundation grants, audiences in Asia, Europe, North and South America, and throughout the United States have been able to experience American art exhibitions and programs. The foundation also embarks on its own initiatives and partnerships in pursuit of its mission.
Grants, initiatives, and partnerships funded in the current fiscal year are listed below.
Academic and Public Program Grants
ANCHOR GRAPHICS @ COLUMBIA COLLEGE (Chicago, Illinois)Testing Grant Organization
$9,200
To support (2) talks included in the 2009–2010 Anchor Graphics @ Columbia College lecture series, "Scraping the Surface," which explores the history and practice of printmaking and American visual culture.
ASSOCIATION DES AMIS DE PONTIGNY–CERISY, THE (Cerisy, France)
$35,000
To support the July 2–9, 2010, international conference "The Sign of Stieglitz," which will examine Stieglitz and his influence on the New York avant-garde between 1890 and 1930.
CHICAGO HUMANITIES FESTIVAL (Chicago, Illinois)
$45,000
To support the 2009–2011 Terra Foundation Lecture on American Art, which is part of the annual Chicago Humanities Festival. Established in 2006, this named lectureship has been a popular addition to the organization’s annual two-week celebration of the humanities and is dedicated to an art historical topic related to the annual festival theme.
CHICAGO HUMANITIES FESTIVAL (Chicago, Illinois)
$15,000
To support the digitization and online presentation of the 2006, 2007, and 2009 Terra Foundation Lecture on American Art delivered at the annual Chicago Humanities Festival.
COLLEGE ART ASSOCIATION (New York, New York)
$42,800
To support 2010 and 2014 Distinguished Scholar Sessions at the 2010 and 2014 Annual Conferences, both of which will take place in Chicago. The purpose of the sessions is to celebrate the contributions of distinguished scholars and curators of American art through panels that will bring together an honoree and five participants.
FREER GALLERY OF ART, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION (Washington, D.C.)
$22,360
To support the October 2009 initial meeting of an International Scholarly Advisory Board and (2) 2010 online seminars.
FRIENDS OF HISTORIC SECOND CHURCH (Chicago, Illinois)
$10,670
To support a 2010 lecture series about late-19th and early-20th century American art and design and a self-guided brochure about Second Presbyterian Church, a designated Chicago landmark listed on the National Register of Historic Places noted for its outstanding Arts and Crafts interior.
MUSÉE DU LOUVRE (Paris, France)
$24,000
To support the La Fayette Database of American Art, which catalogues works of American art produced between 1680 and 1940 in French public collections and is accessible through the Musée du Louvre's Web site (www.louvre.fr). The La Fayette Database was created in 2006 through grants from both the Terra Foundation and the Henry Luce Foundation.
NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY (Evanston, Illinois)
$230,000
To support a new Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in 1600–1950 American Art History in the Department of Art History. The fellowship will begin during the 2010–2011 academic year.
PHILLIPS COLLECTION, THE (Washington, D.C.)
$16,000
To support the November 13–14, 2009, symposium "African Art, Modernist Photography, and the Politics of Representation," co-organized by the Phillips Collection and the University of Maryland's David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora, and the University of Maryland's Department of Art & Archaeology.
SALEM STATE COLLEGE (Salem, Massachusetts)
$30,000
To support the March 2010 scholarly symposium "Visual Culture and Global Trade in the Early American Republic." This symposium will examine early American visual arts in the context of global trade, particularly that with China and the East Indies.
SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM (Washington, D.C.)
$12,000
To support the new Terra Foundation for American Art International Essay Prize, which will recognize excellent scholarship by a non-American in the field of historical American art. The annual prize will be awarded based on quality, new scholarship, and original perspectives.
SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM (Washington, D.C.)
$59,000
To support the October 1–2, 2009, scholarly symposium “A Long and Tumultuous Relationship: East-West Interchanges in American Art,” which will address the complex interactions between American and Asian artists and visual traditions from the 18th to the 20th century. The symposium will challenge earlier scholarship, which often looked primarily at Asian influences on American art as a unidirectional and limited development.
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON (London, United Kingdom)
$24,100
To support the October 15–17, 2009, international, scholarly symposium "Transatlantic Romanticism," which will be hosted by three partnering institutions: the Royal Academy of Art, the Paul Mellon Center for British Art, and University College London. Its aim is to rethink romanticism in the American visual arts within a transatlantic framework, integrating economic relations and the political conflicts and rivalries of the period.
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO (Chicago, Illinois)
$230,000
To support the new Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in pre–1945 American Art History in the Department of Art History. The fellowship will begin during the 2010–2011 academic year.
UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW (Glasgow, Scotland)
$10,825
To support the investigation of the National Inventory Research Project, Department of History of Art, University of Glasgow, into the creation of an online database of historical American art in British public collections similar to the Musée du Louvre's La Fayette Database of American Art.
WINDOWS TO THE WORLD COMMUNICATIONS, INC.(Chicago, Illinois)
$100,000
To support the 2009–2010 production of (6) segments about historical American art for "Artbeat," a feature on WTTW's popular weeknight news magazine Chicago Tonight.
Chicago K-12 Grants
ART RESOURCES IN TEACHING (Chicago, Illinois)$36,000
To fund a summer institute for teachers whose students participate in “American Art Partners,” a program offered by Art Resources in Teaching with the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC), which engages Chicago Public Schools students with American art in the AIC collection.
ART RESOURCES IN TEACHING (Chicago, Illinois)
$66,400
To support the 2009 "American Art Partners" program, a 5-day institute for Chicago Public Schools teachers, which introduces them to American art in the Art Institute of Chicago and Terra Foundation collections and ideas for incorporating American art in the school curriculum, as well as (3) artist residencies in classrooms of participating teachers during the 2009–2010 school year.
CHICAGO ARCHITECTURE FOUNDATION (Chicago, Illinois)
$10,000
To support a fall 2009 professional-development workshop for teachers, "Make No Little Plans: Daniel Burnham's Chicago Legacy," and (2) field-trip programs, "Picturing America," which highlights local examples of work by artists featured in the National Endowment for the Humanities' "Picturing America" poster collection; and "Art in Architecture," through which students explore interrelationships between art and architecture in Chicago buildings.
CHICAGO PUBLIC SCHOOLS (Chicago, Illinois)
$38,400
To support the February 2009 professional development and curriculum project “CPS Pictures America,” which will convene teams of Chicago Public Schools (CPS) teachers and librarians from 30 schools for training focused on “Picturing America,” a new teaching resource from the National Endowment for the Humanities consisting of 40 high-quality American art posters with a curriculum manual. This project builds on two earlier Terra Foundation for American Art grants: in May 2008, the Terra Foundation awarded a grant of $25,000 to the National Trust for the Humanities to help make the “Picturing America” resources available to more than 600 schools; and in October 2007, the Terra Foundation funded a $27,000 pilot project in CPS (“Starting Art in the Library”) that informed the development of “CPS Pictures America.”
CHICAGO TEACHERS' CENTER, NORTHEASTERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY (Chicago, Illinois)
$40,000
To support the fourth year of "American Art in Classroom Teaching," a professional-development and curriculum-development program for K–8 teachers, which is part of a larger initiative, "Every Art, Every Child (EAEC)." Lessons on American art developed through "American Art in Classroom Teaching" will be incorporated into the EAEC curriculum resource.
COLUMBIA COLLEGE CHICAGO (Chicago, Illinois)
$50,000
To support the 2009–2010 program, "Talkin' Back: Chicago Youth Respond," organized by Columbia College Chicago's Center for Community Arts Partnerships and Museum of Contemporary Photography, through which teachers and students will be introduced to historical American photographs. The program includes artist residencies at (6) Chicago Public Schools sites and professional development programs for select Chicago Public Schools teachers.
MARWEN (Chicago, Illinois)
$11,500
To support (3) summer 2009 teacher courses that will blend American art history and art making.
Participants will develop studio projects that can be replicated in the classroom, which will be inspired and informed by American art holdings at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Exhibition Grants
ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO, THE (Chicago, Illinois)$50,000
To support the 2011 exhibition John Marin's Watercolors: A Medium for Modernism, which will focus on the evolution of his watercolor technique and his creation of a new, avant-garde vocabulary for the medium.
ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO, THE (Chicago, Illinois)
$50,000
To support the catalogue and the 2009–2010 exhibition Apostles of Beauty: Arts and Crafts from Britain to Chicago. Drawn entirely from Chicago-area public and private collections, the exhibition will trace the English Arts and Crafts Movement and its subsequent impact on American Arts and Crafts practitioners.
ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO, THE (Chicago, Illinois)
$95,000
To support the symposium and 2011 presentation of the exhibition American Modern:
Documentary Photography by Abbott, Evans, and Bourke-White. Co-organized by the Amon Carter Museum and the Colby College Museum of Art, this exhibition will feature works by the photographers Berenice Abbott, Walker Evans, and Margaret Bourke-White and will examine how these photographers reinvented the genre of documentary.
AZIENDA SPECIALE PALAEXPO (Rome, Italy)
$150,000
To support the catalogue and 2009–2010 Alexander Calder retrospective organized in conjunction with the Calder Foundation. This exhibition will provide a comprehensive survey of Calder's career and will be the first major showing of the artist's work in Rome.
BUCERIUS KUNST FORUM (Hamburg, Germany)
$150,000
To support the exhibition catalogue and 2009 exhibition Modern Life: Edward Hopper and His Time. This exhibition of 75 paintings and works on paper, drawn from the Whitney Museum of American Art’s collection, presents a broad and comprehensive overview of American art from 1900 to 1950, showcasing both well- and lesser-known artists for international audiences.
CENTER FOR CREATIVE PHOTOGRAPHY, UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA (Phoenix, Arizona)
$140,000
To support the exhibition catalogue and international presentation of the 2009–2011 exhibition New Topographics, which will reconstruct the landmark 1975 exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape. The exhibition will assess the aims of the original exhibition; examine the international implications of an American impulse in photography since that time; and consider its precursor’s formidable influence on young photographers today.
CENTRE GEORGES POMPIDOU (Paris, France)
$50,000
To support the exhibition catalogue and 2009 exhibition Alexander Calder: The Paris Years, which follows Calder's progression from painter to sculptor during the crucial years he spent in Paris from 1926 to 1933.
CONTEMPORARY JEWISH MUSEUM (San Francisco, California)
$150,000
To support the symposium, catalogue, and the 2011 exhibition Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories, which will examine Stein's work and her place in 20th-century art and cultural history. This exhibition will provide an in-depth portrait of Stein by knitting together her many identities—her creativity, her engagement with multiple art forms, her domestic life, her desire for fame, and her bi-continental allegiances.
CORCORAN GALLERY OF ART (Washington, D.C.)
$150,000
To support the exhibition catalogue and 2009–2010 exhibition Sargent and the Sea. The exhibition will examine the little explored marine paintings, watercolors, and drawings executed by John Singer Sargent. Featuring 90 works completed between 1874 and 1880, the exhibition includes works from his travels to Normandy, Nice, Brittany, Naples, Capri, Morocco, and other Mediterranean ports.
DAVID AND ALFRED SMART MUSEUM OF ART, THE (Chicago, Illinois)
$35,000
To support the online publication and 2009 exhibition Your Pal, Cliff: Selections from the H. C. Westermann Study Collection, which will focus on the art and life of American artist H. C. Westermann. It will draw on the museum's extensive holdings of Westermann material, donated by the artist's family and associates.
DEPARTMENT OF CULTURAL AFFAIRS(Chicago, Illinois)
$60,000
To support education programming and the 2010 exhibition From Process to Print: Graphic Works by Romare Bearden, which will provide a survey of Bearden's graphic work, including lithographs, etchings, collagraphs, serigraphs, photomontages, monoprints, screenprints, drypoints, as well as engraving and collagraph plates.
DUSABLE MUSEUM OF AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY (Chicago, Illinois)
$37,000
To support educational programming and the 2011 exhibition Buried Treasures: Art in African American Museums, drawn from the collections of 30 African American institutions around the country. The exhibition will display approximately 90 works of art by 19th- and 20th-century African American artists.
EL MUSEO DEL BARRIO (New York, New York)
$200,000
To support the exhibition catalogue and 2009–2010 exhibition, Nexus: New York 1900–1945, which will explore artistic exchanges between artists from 11 Latin American and Caribbean countries who traveled to and resided in New York during the early decades of the 20th century and American artists residing in New York at the same time. Visitors will learn about the institutions, schools, and groups that galvanized cosmopolitan activity in which Caribbean and Latin American artists participated in important dialectical exchanges with American artists.
HARVARD ART MUSEUM (Cambridge, Massachusetts)
$195,000
To support the exhibition catalogue and 2010–2011 project, Lyonel Feininger at Harvard, which entails the Berlin and Munich presentations of two complementary exhibitions drawn from Harvard’s formidable collection of work by Feininger. One exhibition will be devoted to his drawings and watercolors and the other to his virtually unknown photographs. The exhibitions will offer new assessments of his contribution to the exchange of ideas between Europe and the United States in modernism’s formative decades.
ILLINOIS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY (Chicago, Illinois)
$75,000
To support the 2010 exhibition Moholy-Nagy: An Education of the Senses at the Loyola University Museum of Art. The exhibition aims to bring to life the art and ideas of Lazlo Moholy-Nagy.
INTERNATIONAL ARTS AND ARTISTS (Washington, D.C.)
$100,000
To support the exhibition catalogue and 2009–2010 exhibition Object & Image: Man Ray, African Art, & the Modernist Lens at the Phillips Collection, the Museum of Anthropology, University of British Columbia, and any additional venues. The exhibition examines the pivotal role that photographs of African art by Man Ray and others played in the American and European perception and collecting of African objects, as well as their incorporation into modern art.
INTUIT: THE CENTER FOR INTUITIVE AND OUTSIDER ART (Chicago, Illinois)
$43,000
To support the 2010 presentation of the exhibition The Treasure of Ulysses Davis Sculpture from a Savannah Barbershop, organized by the High Museum of Art in collaboration with the King-Tisdell Cottage Foundation. The exhibition presents the sculptures of Ulysses Davis (1914–1990), a Savannah barber and self-taught woodcarver.
KUNSTHALLE EMDEN (Emden, Germany) / PALAZZO MAGNANI (Reggio Emilia, Italy)
$200,000
To support the exhibition catalogue and 2008–2009 exhibition Joan Mitchell— A Discovery of the New York School, which will introduce the work of Joan Mitchell to German, Dutch, and Italian publics. Thirty-five oil paintings will chronicle her work from 1950 until her death in 1992.
LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART (Los Angeles, California)
$250,000
To support the catalogue and the 2011–2012 exhibition In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States, co-organized by Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museo de Arte Moderno (Mexico City, Mexico). The exhibition will examine the importance of Surrealism in American art, the role of women in the surrealist movement, and the unique character of the phenomenon in the United States and Mexico.
LOYOLA UNIVERSITY MUSEUM OF ART (Chicago, Illinois)
$25,000
To support the catalogue and 2009 exhibition Back to the Future, which will include work by Alfred Jensen, Charmion von Wiegand, and Simon Gouverneur whose abstract art developed from strong spiritual convictions.
MORGAN LIBRARY & MUSEUM, THE (New York, New York)
$225,000
To support the catalogue and the 2010–2011 exhibition Roy Lichtenstein: The Black-and-White Drawings, 1961–1968 at the Morgan Library and at the Albertina (Vienna, Austria). The exhibition will trace the development of Roy Lichtenstein's black-and-white drawing style in the 1960s.
MUSÉE DES IMPRESSIONISMES (Giverny, France)
$100,000
To support the catalogue and the 2009 exhibition Joan Mitchell: Paintings, organized in collaboration with the Joan Mitchell Foundation and drawn from collections in the United States and Europe. This exhibition will be the first in France since 1994 to focus on Mitchell's work.
MUSEO CARLO BILOTTI (Rome, Italy)
$140,000
To support the catalogue and 2010 exhibition Philip Guston, Roma which examines the relationships between the work of Philip Guston, his return to figuration, and Italian culture, landscape, and artistic patrimony. It will feature 38 works in oil on paper from Guston's Roma series, executed during his tenure as artist-in-residence at the American Academy in Rome in 1970–1971.
MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART (Chicago, Illinois)
$50,000
To support the 2009 Chicago presentation of the exhibition Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe, organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art. The exhibition explores the career of R. Buckminster Fuller and his contributions to the visual arts and architecture. The MCA presentation will also highlight Fuller's substantial ties to Chicago and Illinois.
TATE (London, United Kingdom)
$575,000
To support the catalogue and the 2009–2010 exhibition Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective, organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art. This comprehensive retrospective of the life and career of Arshile Gorky will include paintings, sculpture, prints, and drawings.
YALE UNIVERSITY ART GALLERY (New Haven, Connecticut)
$150,000
To support the exhibition catalogue and 2010 exhibition John La Farge's Second Paradise: Voyages in the South Seas, 1890-91. In 1890, the artist John La Farge (1835-1910) and the historian Henry Adams (1838-1918) embarked on a year-long journey to the South Pacific. This exhibition and catalogue will provide a broad contextual examination of the most important La Farge South Seas works, in addition to offering a case study of the vogue for exotic travel among artists and writers in the second half of the 19th century.
Partnerships and Initiatives Grants
BUNKAMURA MUSEUM OF ART (Toyko, Japan)$150,000
To support the catalogue and 2010–2011 exhibition Monet and the American Artists of Giverny (working title), co-organized by the Bunkamura Museum of Art and the Terra Foundation for American Art, which will travel to three venues in Japan. The exhibition will introduce Japanese audiences to numerous American artists who lived and worked in the Normandy village of Giverny, where Claude Monet made his home.
TERRA FOUNDATION FOR AMERICAN ART (Chicago, Illinois)
$62,000
To support “What’s the Matter with Modernism?: Reclaiming its Multiple Meanings," a two-day June 2009 symposium and related evening public program, which will coincide with the Milwaukee Art Museum presentation of the exhibition The Eight and American Modernisms, co-organized by the Terra Foundation. The symposium will include panel discussions and gallery talks. Participants, including both established scholars and new voices in the field of American art, will complicate and discuss the terms and ideas that have formed the basis of our understanding the art of in the first three decades of the twentieth century within an innovative framework that will encourage dialogue and debate. To help structure the discussion, the symposium will open with a panel session focusing specifically on the scholarly historiography of this period and its revisions. Subsequent panels will feature short papers and roundtable discussions analyzing important keywords such as realism, regionalism, or abstraction. A separate public program showcasing a well-known essayist with a reputation for probing interesting aspects of American art will augment the academic program.
TERRA RESEARCH AND TRAVEL GRANTS, 2010-2011
$97,000
To support the Terra Research and Travel Grants, which are awarded to six European scholars studying American art and culture at the doctoral and post-doctoral level. These grants support short-term travel, giving doctoral students and junior researchers the opportunity to consult resources which are only available in the United States. The fellowships are offered through partnering institutions in France (Institut National de l'Histoire de l'Art, Paris), Germany (John F. Kennedy Institute, Freie Universität, Berlin in partnership with Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich) and Great Britain (Courtauld Institute of Art, London).
TERRA SUMMER RESIDENCY (Giverny, France)
$346,369
To support the Terra Summer Residency, which Michael Leja, a noted historian of American art, cited as one of the most transformative elements in the current shaping of American art studies as an international field. The program enables doctoral students in American art and visual culture to pursue individual research and intellectual exchange with artists and prominent art historians while in residence in Giverny, France, for 8 weeks during the summer.
TERRA TEACHER LAB (Chicago, Illinois)
$203,300
To support the Terra Teacher Lab, a year-long professional-development program designed for social-studies, art, and language-arts teachers and school librarians in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) system. The Teacher Lab introduces teachers to American art and supports them as they develop innovative ways to use American art to bring their curriculum to life. The program is distinguished in the depth and breadth of instruction it provides and the degree of follow-up with participants.