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Grants & Fellowship Opportunities

Terra Foundation Partnerships & Initiatives

Museum of Vernacular Arts and Knowledge
$800,000
Chicago, IL
2025

To support organization planning and the expansion of the New Art School Modality (NASM), an innovative and affordable alternative to traditional art schools. NASM offers free or low-cost art and art history courses to a diverse community, emphasizing underrecognized art histories, forms, and learning methods. The program fosters collective teaching, intergenerational exchange, and collaborative approaches rooted in various cultural contexts.

College Art Association
$40,000
New York, NY
2025

The College Art Association (CAA) seeks support for its 113th and 114th Annual Conferences, taking place in 2025 and 2026. As the largest professional convening of artists, art historians, curators, designers, students, and visual art professionals, the “CAA Annual Conference” provides a space for dialogue, professional development, and the presentation of new research in the visual arts. While conference content evolves each year based on submissions, the study and creation of American art remains a core focus, offering opportunities to engage with a range of perspectives and expanding narratives in the field. Terra Foundation support will help sustain this convening as a platform for scholarship and critical discussion, particularly at a time of ongoing transformation in the study of American art. By bringing together practitioners and researchers, the conference fosters engagement with historical and contemporary issues, ensuring continued dialogue on the evolving role of American art within a broader cultural and global context.

Black Trustee Alliance for Art Museums
$30,000
New York, NY
2025

Funding supports trustee education and mentorship, research on systems change within museums, advocacy for advancing inclusion in the arts, and year-round programming to strengthen Black Trustee Alliance’s network of nearly 200 Black trustees, artists, philanthropists, and cultural leaders. These efforts are intended to drive institutional transformation toward greater inclusion and equity in the arts.

Rebuild Foundation
$125,000
Chicago, IL
2025

Building on fifteen years of artist-led, community-based work, Theaster Gates and Rebuild Foundation will undertake a year of strategic planning and experimentation to refine the organization’s vision, respond to evolving community needs, and explore new models for programming and engagement. During this pivotal year, “Rebuild” will pause public programming to focus on developing infrastructure, testing new approaches to archival engagement, and strengthening community collaboration. This planning process will lay the foundation for “Rebuild’s” next chapter, centering artist residencies, archival stewardship, land management, pedagogy, and craft. Through ongoing experimentation and strategic planning, “Rebuild” will chart a path forward as a vital hub for Black artistic innovation and cultural preservation on Chicago’s South Side.

Afield
$50,000
Paris, France
2025

To support the multi-year AFIELD forums on the themes of “Transitional Justice by Artists” (2025) and “Institutions by Artists” (2026) hosted by KANAL—Centre Pompidou in Brussels, Belgium, the Kunstenfestivaldesarts, and AFIELD, an international network of artists-led initiatives. These convenings connect American and international artists as well as curators, cultural practitioners, policymakers, students, and the public interested in the role of art as leverage for solution-building and societal transformation. Drawing from the forums, a publication, to be released in 2026, will critically explore the intersection between art, history, and social justice, highlighting the role of art and artists in addressing societal and cultural challenges.

Allied Media Projects Inc.
$50,000
Detroit, MI
2025

“For Real For Real” is an exhibition held at DAAD in Berlin in spring 2025 presenting the work of contemporary artists such as Alexandra Bell, Mel Chin, Theaster Gates, Saidiya Hartman, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Martine Syms, Kara Walker or Carrie Mae Weems, whose practice engages with the ordinariness of our individual lives. In addition, Claudia Rankine will lead community-driven workshops and a publication project focused on storytelling involving students from Bard College Berlin and Dartmouth among others.

Black Artists Archive
$125,000
Detroit, MI
2025

The Black Artists Archive will create a physical and digital archive to preserve the legacies of Black artists from Detroit and the Midwest. The goal of the Black Artists Archive is to create a space where Black artists and curators can preserve their legacies and research with support and long-term investment, creating and sustaining practice change in the space of traditional museums or archival centers that continue to operate within exclusionary frameworks rooted in colonial practices and systemic barriers. Over a year and a half, the Black Artists Archive will implement Phase One of its archive development plan by designing and launching its website, which will be the central location for the digital archives and the main resource for locating physical materials. The first archive slated for digitization is that of the Arts Extended Gallery, a Black arts organization founded in Detroit in 1952. Next steps will involve audience research; conducting stakeholder interviews; and expanding the collection through oral histories and adding other relevant collections. Future phases of the Black Artists Archive include establishing the Black Curatorial Institute to advance new approaches to curatorial and archival practice, as well as an incubator residency to create interdisciplinary dialogues between curators and artists in Detroit.

New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA)
$25,000
New York, NY
2025

The Burns Halperin Report is the largest dataset tracking representation in US museums and the international art market, analyzing acquisitions, exhibitions, and auction results since 2018. Integrating data analysis, art history, and journalism, the project offers important tools that inform field practices and help museums and the greater sector gauge progress toward achieving equity and diversity in collecting and exhibition programs. Past reports have focused on Black American and female-identifying artists; the upcoming edition will spotlight Latinx artists, addressing their underrepresentation in museums and the art market.

This grant supports the development of a robust relational database to replace the outdated Google Docs system currently used for the report, accommodating complex identity data and serving as a permanent foundation for future reports. An advisory committee comprising Latinx art scholars has defined criteria for identifying Latinx art, using historical and evolving frameworks.

Contemporary And (C&)
$45,000
Berlin, Germany
2025

“Language and Our Responsibility” is a three-day convening conceived by Contemporary And, bringing together US and Global Majority publishers, academics, and cultural practitioners to examine how to challenge the dominance of exclusionary colonial languages (like English, French, or Spanish). It will explore ways to amplify Indigenous languages, foster equitable representation in global art discourse, and ensure ideas are communicated accessibly across diverse linguistic groups without creating barriers for broader audiences. Held at the Terra Foundation for American Art’s Giverny properties in July 2025, discussions will also address integrating these languages into digital archives, repurposing colonial languages to challenge hierarchies, and mitigating biases in digital technology. Findings, methodologies, and insights will be shared globally through multilingual content on the initiative’s website, partner platforms, and art-focused publications to ensure broad engagement and lasting impact.

Aichi Trienniale
$50,000
Aichi, Japan
2025

To support the participation of American and Indigenous artists in A Time Between Ashes and Roses, the 2025 Aichi Triennale, a global arts and culture festival in Japan, exploring alternative models of the human relationship to the environment. Featuring a diverse range of Japanese and international artists, the Trienniale is held at a variety of venues in cities throughout Aichi Prefecture, each conveying the spirit of artistic diversity from the region. The contributing artists research the multifaceted aspects of Aichi Prefecture, explore the culture and history of its cities, or create new works using materials unique to the place, creating interactions with the sites, its communities, and local audiences, and connecting the local and the global in an intercultural exchange.

Àkéte Art Foundation/ Lagos Biennial
$100,000
Lagos, Nigeria
2025

To support The Museum of Things Unseen, the Lagos Biennial’s fifth edition in fall 2026, which offers a platform for contemporary art in the city. The Biennial fosters the production, critical reception, and dialogue on contemporary art in Africa and explores contested histories through site-specific installations. The 2026 Biennial seeks to recontextualize rarely or never seen works, including a selection by US and Indigenous artists, through artistic interventions and critical dialogues. The creation of this speculative museum space in Lagos opens questions on art’s visibility and affords new interpretive frameworks for the works presented. It also brings them in dialogue with African and global audiences and deepens the conversation around their socio-political significance while advancing critical reflections on museum-making.

The Recovery Plan
$125,000
Florence, Italy
2025

To support Setting the Table for the Congress of Black Artists and Writers, a research and development initiative developed in preparation of an international convening to take place in Florence in 2029, marking the 70th anniversary of the Second Congress of Black Artists and Writers organized in Rome. A steering committee of intergenerational leaders of artist-run spaces and collectives in the US, Europe, and on the African continent will organize short research residencies and annual collective retreats over the course of three years. The objective is to examine planning, format, structure, and methodologies of implementation of Black artists’ archives and convenings by producing a wayfinding for a collective future rooted in self-empowerment, shared imaginings, and transnational solidarities.