Chicago Grants Awarded Summer 2024

The Terra Foundation’s summer grants support three projects in Chicago. Through its Art Design Chicago initiative—a series of events and exhibitions that highlight the city’s artistic heritage and creative communities—the foundation supported the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago’s exhibition Andrea Carlson: Shimmer on Horizons. Also supported are Floating Museum’s The Burroughs Residency Pilot and the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago’s publication The Hamza Walker Book of Essays.

Andrea Carlson: Shimmer on Horizons is the twenty-sixth Chicago Works exhibition, the MCA’s solo series featuring local artists who are shaping the contemporary art landscape. In Shimmer on Horizons we see Carlson considering the impact of history, relationships, and power on landscapes. Through a sculpture inspired by effigy mounds, a video installation, a series of panoramic paintings, and other works, Carlson references her family and peers, Ojibwe history, and Indigenous sovereignty. Her art celebrates the infinite histories of Indigenous presence, resistance, and futurity.

“The MCA is honored to present Andrea Carlson’s first solo museum exhibition in Chicago. We are looking forward to sharing Carlson’s powerful and timely work with our audiences,” said Iris Colburn, MCA Curator and Curatorial Associate. “Alongside the exhibition, we are thrilled to be collaborating with the Center for Native Futures, a space dedicated to Native artists that Carlson co-founded, on a public program with the poet Heid E. Erdrich.”

Floating Museum is working to create the Burroughs Residency, a pilot residency program intended to foster innovative connections between art, community, architecture, and public institutions and to honor the poet, printmaker, activist, and advocate Dr. Margaret T. Burroughs. Floating Museum will initiate a community-engaged research and development process and will host two pilot cohorts through the residency. With both local and international creatives–in–residence, the residency will provide its participants with a living and studio space. Focusing on the systems and infrastructures of inequality, this project aims to think about spaces outside majority-white cultural centers, concentrating instead on building cultural centers in partnership with, rather than for, these communities.

“In honor of poet, printmaker, activist, and advocate Dr. Margaret T. Burroughs, Floating Museum’s The Burroughs Residency Pilot envisions the dynamic artistic and cultural landscape of Chicago as the site of a ‘residency without walls,’” said Leilani Douglas, Floating Museum’s Development Director. “During the pilot period, Floating Museum will engage local and international artists and creatives of color and convene community-based arts and culture organizations across Chicago to ask questions such as: ‘What could a residency without walls be?’, ‘How might our cultural community be served and strengthened by greater connectivity and resource-sharing?’, and ‘How would artists- and creatives-in-residence best be served by a highly connected network of cultural resources?’

“The Burroughs Residency Pilot will produce deeply rooted knowledge about the robust strengths and critical needs of Chicago’s arts and culture communities, and it will generate new, mutual beneficial models of collaboration.”

For a list of all foundation grants awarded, and for more information about these grants, please see the grants database. For information about the additional grants awarded in summer 2024, please see the Grants Awarded story.