Letter from Our President & CEO, Spring 2025

Amid the current uncertainty, our grantees and partners continue to lead with urgency and imagination, cultivating spaces for critical reflection and shaping our shared futures. We are steadfast in our support for these institutions and individuals as they work to broaden understandings of American art and its histories. We seek to create space for new ideas and modes of collaboration, and to always be a thoughtful philanthropic partner. The needs of museums, universities, cultural centers, and community organizations are changing, and we are listening to them, learning from their experiences and responding to these evolving demands. This outreach has led to further refinement of the grantmaking programs that ground our work. It is also expressed in the launch of our new visual identity and website, which reflects our current and future path.

Since its inception, the Terra Foundation has been dedicated to the study and presentation of American art. Our funding has supported a wide range of exhibitions, installations, publications, convenings, and programs locally and globally. Through our work with our partners and grantees, we experience American art as dynamic, multifaceted, and ambitious. It is rich with inquiry, innovation, resilience, and joy. Through the eyes and voices of many, American art tells our nation’s story. There is increased urgency to our mission: the stories we tell through art, and how we tell them, allow us to understand who we are and who we can be.

We will persist in supporting our grantees and partners as they tell these stories in their full breadth and complexity. In doing so, we continue our efforts to establish relationships with a broad range of organizations across rural, regional, suburban, and urban geographies and to extend financial resources to smaller, community-based cultural centers. Through these links, we can support organizations of varying scale, budget, and focus and can reach numerous communities across the country and around the world. We also remain committed to creating global opportunities for cultural exchange and dialogue essential to fostering mutual understanding, deepening collaboration, and connecting artistic and social perspectives across geographies.

In the current fiscal year, we awarded over $12.5 million across 170 grants. Our drive to help expand the narratives of American art—embracing the plurality of the people who have shaped it—remains paramount. This work is indispensable to create compelling pathways to learning about our history. It helps us to find shared understanding and commonality across cultural differences and political divisions, and to imagine a future in which art is central to education, innovation, and civic engagement. We will support those who expand the American story with accuracy and an openness to varied viewpoints and human experiences. We cannot do this work alone—we will invest in coalition-building, convening, and knowledge-sharing to strengthen the field of American art and to stand behind those shaping more just and transformative futures.

We know that American art, past and present, is united by the courage of individuals who push the boundaries of possibility and create extraordinary things. We at the Terra Foundation are committed to supporting the realization of their visions.