Terra Collection-in-Residence: Harvard Art Museums

Part of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard Art Museums is a leader in innovative museological approaches and plays a vital role as a space for teaching, cross-disciplinary study, and learning through art. Established in 1895 with the Fogg Museum, the Harvard Art Museums house more than 250,000 objects. One of the largest and most renowned art collections in the United States, Harvard Art Museums comprise three museums and four research centers.

The Terra Foundation loans are displayed in the gallery spaces dedicated to both European and American art. The museum’s objectives for this project are rooted in decolonial and ethnoecological perspectives within queer studies. These approaches emphasize materiality and process, and they challenge conventional narratives and binaries by posing open-ended questions rather than seeking definitive answers. The borrowed works help highlight overlooked histories and encourage dialogue about the selected artists and their historical periods, which might be considered both distinctly American and distinctly European.

“The loans from the foundation are helping us think through discursive ideologies around ecological relationships, including renewed trade-routes and the global exchange of ideas, toward the chronological bookend of the European and American galleries, in the decades following the US Civil War. We could not do this work without deep partnership and ongoing dialogue with the foundation,” said Horace Ballard, Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., Curator of American Art, Harvard Art Museums.

In May 2023, Kelli Morgan, former Professor of Curatorial Studies, History of Art and Architecture, and Director of Curatorial Studies at Tufts University, delivered a gallery talk in front of Samuel Morse’s large Gallery of the Louvre (1831–33), and invited the audience to share their observations. One attendee pointed out that there were more women than men in the work, sparking a discussion that began with considerations of women undertaking the Grand Tour of continental Europe in the nineteenth century and expanded to encompass contemporary artists like the Guerilla Girls.

Gallery labels for the four paintings on loan from the Terra Foundation have been re-written to include perspectives from recent scholarly engagement. The first new label, written by a graduate student intern for a painting attributed to Martin Johnson Heade, Two Owls at Sunset (c. 1859-60), included details from her research that may affect the work’s date and attribution.

Five prints by Mary Cassatt that are part of the loan were part of a Cassatt Study Day at the museums with Baltimore-based artist LaToya M. Hobbs and academic partners. The group engaged in close looking and conversations about the relationships of Cassatt to later women printmakers and between the art of woodblock printing and sculpture.

“I think the key to prolonged engagement is structuring various modes of engagements across the three or four years of the initiative,” said Ballard. “I have every confidence that the nine works will continue to be engaged in university teaching, and the four paintings will continue to be central aspects in public programming, through our late night gallery hunts and tours; through public curator-led and student-led experiences; and through label refreshes and public viewing,”

Nine works are on loan for a period of four years (December 2022–December 2026).