Terra Collection-in-Residence: Ashmolean Museum

The world’s oldest university museum, founded in 1683, the Ashmolean Museum at the University of Oxford, UK, develops programs for active audience engagement. Its collections range from ancient Egyptian to contemporary art, telling stories across cultures and time. The museum is committed to preserving, enhancing, and sharing its collections to promote research, learning, and enjoyment; to enrich lives; and to expand our understanding of the world and our shared humanity.

The museum uses the Terra Foundation artworks on loan to develop classes for undergraduate and graduate students, provide training and career-development opportunities for faculty and early-career researchers, and prompt new interpretations for permanent collection works. Thirty-seven prints from the Terra Foundation are housed in the museum’s Western Art Print Room and made available to professors and students.

Students working in a micro-internship program examined the prints to consider their potential uses in teaching. The prints also inspired Krasis, a unique museum-based interdisciplinary teaching and learning program at the museum. As part of the 2023 Krasis workshop, professors and teaching fellows analyzed and discussed the American prints from a diversity of perspectives.

“The program has proven enormously beneficial to the museum and to the university. We have been delighted by the ways in which the prints have opened up opportunities for collaborative teaching and research, offering new and diverse perspectives on the Ashmolean’s permanent collection,” said Dr. Jim Harris, teaching curator, Ashmolean Museum. “The prints have featured in classes in a wide range of disciplines and departments, including English, History, History of Art, Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies, American Studies, Japanese Studies, and Refugee Studies. They have been examined by students in the contexts of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Japonisme, queer literature and visual culture, and the history of forced migration, among many others.”

One painting and 37 prints are on loan for a period of four years (September 2022–September 2026). A selection of these works is below; see the full object list.