Grants Awarded Spring 2026

The initiatives address three primary areas: research and learning, archives and collections, and ecosystem support. Dillard University leads the Visualizing Dillard project, which is developing an illustrated publication and digital resource to highlight the university’s influence on art, culture, and race relations. A collaboration between Fisk University and the National Urban League aims to recover archival records to broaden the scope of American art history. These projects generate new publications and digital tools that will facilitate research.

Fisk University’s Archiving the Southern Renaissance: Charles S. Johnson and the Art of Cultural Patronage catalogs and interprets materials related to Charles S. Johnson, a university president and civil rights leader. The National Urban League’s Resistance in Our Stories: The Literature and Art of Opportunity uses newly processed archives to highlight stories connected to Johnson’s legacy.

Turry M. Flucker, Terra Foundation Vice President of Collections and Partnerships, notes: “Each of the three projects centers on the enduring contributions of Charles Spurgeon Johnson, a distinguished sociologist, cultural broker, and founding editor of the National Urban League’s Opportunity: A Journal for Negro Life, as well as on his central leadership role within the American Missionary Association of New York (AMA). Johnson played a pivotal role in the Harlem Renaissance and is recognized as one of its principal architects. He argued that art and literature could advance race relations and actively supported emerging creative talent through the Opportunity journal. During his tenure as chair of the Fisk University social science department, director of the AMA-supported Race Relations Institute (an early iteration of the Amistad Research Center), and later as president of Fisk University, Johnson recruited Aaron Douglas and other Harlem Renaissance artists, intellectuals, and benefactors, including Carl Van Vechten and Georgia O’Keeffe.”

“The founding of Dillard University is closely linked to the intellectual vitality and social and cultural experimentation at Fisk University, led by Will W. Alexander and Horace Mann Bond, both contemporaries of Johnson. Horace Mann Bond served as Dean of Dillard University from 1935 to 1939, and Will W. Alexander was the institution’s inaugural president. Their efforts were supported by Edwin Embree of the Rosenwald Fund, Edith Rosenwald Stern and Edgar Stern of New Orleans. American-Mexican artist Elizabeth Catlett later established the university’s art program.”

“These projects advance the foundation’s primary objectives by fostering local and international collaborations among institutions, promoting their long-term sustainability and enhancing the broader understanding of American art.”

Additional institutions receiving support for initiatves include the RAW Material Company, a center for art, knowledge, and society based in Dakar, Senegal; and the First American Museum in Oklahoma City.

The three-year project RAW Material Company: Center for Art, Knowledge, and Society will encompass exhibitions, a symposium, and an academic summer fellowship, engaging Native American, Black American, African, and diasporic perspectives, and foregrounding interconnected histories that expand narratives of American art. It will also create opportunities for reciprocal exchange with such US partners as the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands at Arizona State University and the Engine for Art, Democracy, and Justice at Vanderbilt University.

RAW Amazones, RAW Material Company states, “As stewards of this grant, our vision for this project is to nurture a constellation of transnational artistic and intellectual kinship. We aim to illuminate the deep, enduring resonances that thread through Black and Indigenous American experiences and African and diasporic worlds, both historically and in the contemporary. This curatorial embrace, in continuation on the foundation laid by the late and great Koyo Kouoh, seeks to forge a shared critical lexicon—a warm set of analytical spaces and moments of convening—that empowers practitioners to decipher their political landscapes, recognize common structural currents, voice collective realities, and step with renewed assurance into the forces shaping their own orbits.”

The First American Museum’s WINIKO project is dedicated to a curatorial framework that focuses on Indigenous methodology and seeks to reunite objects—collected over a century ago and on loan to FAM from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI)—with their respective peoples and cultures. (Winiko is a Caddo word meaning “everything on earth.”) Initiatives made possible by this grant program include new installations, expanded information on connections to the thirty-nine tribal nations, and new interpretive panels. In keeping with its belief that reunifying cultural materials with their source families benefits nations and collecting institutions, FAM will also facilitate additional object-family reunions and model core practices for this transformative work.

“First Americans Museum’s scheduled 2026 rotation for WINIKO: Life of an Object will represent in the gallery how we successfully created Reunions for ancestral items on loan from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian,” said heather ahtone, FAM’s Curatorial Affairs director. “This project models how items collected during the salvage ethnology period can be reunited with living descendants within tribal communities today.”

Through our collections program, the foundation awarded grants across the United States as well as to one project in Brazil. The Honolulu Museum of Art’s Re-Centering the Arts of Hawaiʻi will celebrate Indigenous art and culture and center Hawaiian artists in the museum’s art historical narratives. It will also engage community advisors to support curatorial, education, and collections teams with research and with the presentation and interpretation of Indigenous-made artworks.

“As we approach our centennial in 2027, this project will transform the way we think and work internally while creating new ways for visitors to discover and experience art of Hawai‘i,” says HoMA’s Director of Curatorial Affairs Catherine Whitney. “We are working with cultural consultants and source community on the interpretation, layout, and digitization of our collections of traditional Hawaiian arts—many works of which have not been previously photographed or fully documented—to increase accessibility. And thanks to Terra Foundation’s grant, we look forward to reinstalling and relocating our Arts of Hawai‘i gallery, featuring Native Hawaiian and Hawai‘i-based artists along with art about Hawai‘i, near the front of the museum. Together these interdepartmental and community-involved initiatives offer an opportunity for our curators to rethink the art historical narrative of the collection, and allow us to address histories of indigeneity, migration, and exchange.”

At the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Things to Come: Time, Technology, and the Future will consider how a broad range of American artists, from the Cold War to the present, have used their work to envision the future—from imagining a new existence to escaping the weight of the current moment.

“We are grateful for the support of the Terra Foundation for American Art in reenvisioning how we utilize and activate our permanent collection as we prepare to open our new museum in Downtown Memphis this December,” said Patricia Lee Daigle, Chief Curator. “By considering notions of futurity from a variety of cultural and historical perspectives, the exhibition reveals that the way artists have envisioned the future is often most evocative of the present moment.”

The nineteen new convening grants represent a broad range of institutions across the United States and abroad. Among the grantees is the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York. The center is developing the second iteration of its Diasporican Cultural Summit, a two-day academic and cultural convening that will bring together scholars, artists, editors, and cultural practitioners to examine Puerto Rican diasporic histories through interdisciplinary and collaborative research methodologies.

“The second Diasporican Cultural Summit fosters a new generation of researchers across all artistic disciplines,” said Ángel Antonio Ruiz Laboy, Associate Director of Arts and Culture. “By empowering students to pursue community-grounded scholarship, we challenge the systemic under-visibility of Puerto Rican and diasporic artists. This project fulfills our responsibility to provide vital support and visibility, utilizing the transformative power of research on art as an inclusive, essential tool for long-term social change.”

Zachęta—National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, Poland, will present Horizontal Histories: Latinx Art, Displacement, and Resistance in Comparative Perspective, a three-day convening that will place Latinx artistic and political histories in dialogue with Central and Eastern European experiences of migration, democracy, and identity.

“We are honored to support Horizontal Histories: Latinx Art, Displacement, and Resistance in Comparative Perspective, made possible with funding from the Terra Foundation for American Art,” remarks Agnieszka Pindera, Director of Zachęta—National Gallery of Art. “This convening brings together artists, scholars, and communities to explore migration, political struggle, and belonging. It embodies the museum’s commitment to inclusive, socially engaged programming and offers Warsaw audiences a rare opportunity to encounter Latinx artistic practices while fostering dialogue across the Americas and Central and Eastern Europe.”

Afield, Paris, France, Afield Tool Library and Artist-Led Initiatives School, $80,000

Alaska Native Heritage Center, Anchorage, Alaska, Circumpolar Connections: Indigenous Arts in the Arctic, $100,000

Black Metropolis Research Consortium, Chicago, IL, A Note on Method: Celebrating Twenty Years of the Black Metropolis Research Consortium, $25,000

Dillard University, New Orleans, LA, Visualizing Dillard: American Art, Archives, and Architecture, $80,000

Enrich Chicago, Chicago, IL, Operations, Leadership Transition Planning, and Research, $50,000

First Americans Museum, Oklahoma City, OK, WINIKO: 2026 Rotation, $100,000

Fisk University, Nashville, TN, Archiving the Southern Renaissance, Charles S. Johnson and the Art of Cultural Patronage: Phase I Discovery, $180,000

Fondazione Biennale di Venezia, Venezia, Veneto, Italy, La Biennale di Venezia, $200,000

Freshgrass Public Foundation, North Adams, MA, 250 & CHANGE: A Monument to the Future, $150,000

Gallery 400 at University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL, Press and Pull: Two Decades at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, $35,000

Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, IL, The Veteran Art Triennial: Resisting the Long Wars, $65,000

National Urban League Inc, New York, NY, Resistance in Our Stories: The Literature and Art of Opportunity, $250,000

The Racial Imaginary Institute, Detroit, MI, Project Marseille, $50,000

RAW Material Company, Dakar, Senegal, RAW Material Company: Center for Art, Knowledge, and Society, $250,000

South Side Community Art Center, Chicago, IL, Archival Preservation and Activation Initiative, $200,000

Amigos del Museo del Barrio, Inc., New York, NY, A Mano: Art and Craft from the Permanent Collection, $100,000

The Brinton Museum, Big Horn, WY, The Unfinished War: The Battle of the Little Bighorn in Native American Art, $75,000

The Bronx Museum, Bronx, NY, In the Details: Women Artists in the Bronx Museum Permanent Collection, $30,000

The Gund at Kenyon College, Gambier, OH, Plurality, Belonging, and the Collection at The Gund, $80,000

History Colorado, Denver, CO, Pino Nuche “Ute” Beadwork Exhibit, $75,000

Honolulu Museum of Art, Honolulu, HI, Re-Centering the Arts of Hawaiʻi, $100,000

Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, TN, Things to Come: Time, Technology, and the Future, $36,500

Minnesota Marine Art Museum, Winona, MN, Fluid: A Curatorial Cohort Reimagining the Minnesota Marine Art Museum’s permanent collection, $73,000

Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil, Democracy in the Making: MAC USP and Network Collections in the Americas, $75,000

Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Chicago, IL, Implementation support for From the Center: Looking at Lucy Lippard (8/1/2026–3/28/2027) at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, $75,000

Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago, Chicago, IL, If Emmett Till Lived: Freedom on American Ground, $100,000

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, Revolutionizing Icons: A Reinstallation of the 18th Century, Art of the Americas Galleries at the MFA, Boston, $75,000

Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, Santa Fe, NM, Brilliant Gleaming: The Art of Silverhorn, $75,000

Museum of International Folk Art, Santa Fe, NM, I Am Clay: Acoma Life in Figures, $100,000

Museum of Northern Arizona, Flagstaff, AZ, Artist Hopid: Ancient to Modern Stories, $75,000

Museum of Northwest Art, La Conner, WA, Creating a Road Map to Broaden Interpretive Frameworks for Exploring Regional Identities, Relationships to the Land, and the Creation of Local Economies in Northwest US Art, $75,000

National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, DC, Stretching the Canvas: Ten Decades of Native Painting, $100,000

New York Historical, New York, NY, Democracy Matters, $100,000

Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, NM, Reframing O’Keeffe in Community, $75,000

Old Dartmouth Historical Society, New Bedford, MA, Melting Glaciers, Rising Seas: William Bradford (1823–1892), Climate Change, and the Contemporary, $75,000

Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, OK, Centering Indigenous Voices: Planning a Rotating Native Art Series in Collaboration with Philbrook Museum of Art, $25,000

Pomona College, Claremont, CA, Almost Instantaneous: Understanding and Interpreting Wire Photography, $75,000

Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR, Reimagining the Native American Galleries at the Portland Art Museum, $75,000

Tampa Museum of Art, Tampa, FL, I Know the Sun Will Shine: Mary Proctor, Ruby Williams, and Purvis Young, $35,000

Telfair Museum of Art, Inc., Savannah, GA, Localizing American Art in Coastal Georgia, $75,000

Doris Ulmann Galleries at Berea College, Berea, KY, Semiquincentennial Exhibitions at Berea College’s Doris Ulmann Galleries, 2026–2027, $94,000

University of Southern California, ONE Archives at the USC Libraries, Los Angeles, CA, Turning the Page: Print Culture and Lesbian Identity, $100,000

Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY, Grounding, Not Founding: Implementing the Loeb’s ReEnvisioned Founding Collection of Hudson River School Paintings, $100,000

Wenatchee Valley Museum and Cultural Center, Wenatchee, WA, Since Time Immemorial, $50,000

Robert W. Woodruff Arts Center, Inc., Atlanta, GA, American Galleries Reinstallation, $75,000

Abbe Museum, Bar Harbor, ME, Gathering Dawnland Arts & Thought Leaders, $10,000

American Federation of Arts, New York, NY, ArtViews: Native Perspectives in Contemporary Art, $25,000

Anchorage Museum, Anchorage, AK, Socially Engaged Art and the Work of Emergency Preparedness, $20,000

Banneker Douglass Museum Foundation, Inc., Annapolis, MD, Maryland Commission on African American History and Culture (MCAAHC) Symposium, $10,000

Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY, Celebration: Hopi Kachina Dolls Blessings for a Balanced World, $20,000

Brown University, Providence, RI, Exposure: Black Queer Visual Constellations exhibition symposium, $25,000

BULK Space, Detroit, MI, BULK Space x MdW: Regional Voices & Radical Practices, $10,000

Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Hunter College, CUNY, New York, NY, Diasporican Cultural Summit II, $25,000

Chicago Public Art Group, Chicago, IL, Legacy in Practice: Public Art Conservation and Cultural Memory in Motion, $17,500

Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, DE, DelArt’s Citizen Artist Summit, $25,000

Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator, Inc, Miami, FL, Highlighting Creole Miami | 30 Years of DVCAI Artists and Archives, $25,000

Independent Curators International, New York, NY, Curating Today: Reimagining the Civic, $25,000

Indian Pueblo Cultural Center, Albuquerque, NM, Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery, $25,000

Montana State University Foundation, Bozeman, MT, On the Edge of American: Art, Exodusters, and Expatriates, 1850–1900, $20,800

Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico, International Chicanx Art Encounter, $25,000

Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Chicago, IL, Public Practice: A Convening on Collaboration, Engagement, and Programming, $25,000

National Museum of Colombia, Bogotá, Bogota DC, Colombia, Afro-Diasporic Knowledge Gathering: Hemispheric and Transatlantic Dialogues at the Afro-Diasporic Biennial, $25,000

Right to Democracy Project, Washington, DC, Creative Circle Pacific Convening, $25,000

Zachęta—National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Mazovia, Poland, Horizontal Histories: Latinx Art, Displacement, and Resistance in Comparative Perspective, $25,000