Samuel Morse, Gallery of the Louvre, 1831-1833
Additionally, 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
1/20/2011–4/30/2013Milwaukee 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.
Expanded Galleries of American Art
4/1/2005–PresentArt 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.
Gallery Installation
2/18/2011–12/31/2014Pennsylvania 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
7/3/2011–7/8/2012National Gallery of Art
Washington, D.C.
8/1/2012–8/31/2013
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.
A Will of Their Own: Judith Murray and Women of Achievement in the Early Republic
4/20/2012–9/2/2013National 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.
Artist and Visionary: William Matthew Prior Revealed
5/26/2012–12/31/2012Fenimore Museum of Art
Cooperstown, New York
American Folk Art Museum
Lincoln Square Galleries, New York, New York
The exhibition will include approximately fifty paintings by the artist, considered one of the most prolific and significant artists known in American folk art. The painter varied his style to fit the tastes and pocketbooks of his clients. He was a follower of Adventism and an abolitionist. The exhibition will examine Prior as an artist and as well as a religious activist and social reformer. The Terra’s portrait of sisters, each holding a bible, illustrates not only lifelong familial loyalty between the sisters but their piety and propriety.