On June 1, the Georgia Museum of Art received four of five oil paintings it will be borrowing for the next four years from the Terra Foundation for American Art as well as a grant for $25,000 each year of the loan to fund exhibitions including these works. The museum is excited to work with the Terra Foundation in its efforts to center marginalized and underrepresented perspectives in American art by pairing these paintings with works from its own collection that resonate with these narratives. Founded by Daniel J. Terra in 1978, the Terra Foundation houses a collection of more than 750 paintings by 242 artists, which it generously loans to an international variety of organizations for the expansion of scholarship on and appreciation of American art. The four paintings on loan to the museum are “Portrait of a Lady in a Blue Dress,” by John Singleton Copley (1763); “Old Time Letter Rack,” by John F. Peto (1894), “Les Invalides, Paris” by Henry Ossawa Tanner (1896) and “Bucks County Barn,” by Charles Sheeler (1940), with “Telegraph Poles with Buildings,” by Joseph Stella (1917), to arrive in 2023.
These works have been incorporated into the museum’s permanent collection galleries. Copley’s portrait is fostering conversations between northern and southern colonial portraiture, and programming in spring 2023 will examine it in light of the links among colonial portraiture, whiteness, the economy of slavery and the ecology of commodities like indigo in the Americas. Sheeler’s painting hangs alongside our red barn painting by Georgia O’Keeffe, raising the question of how rural subjects served the cause of American modernism, which is often understood as an urban phenomenon.
They will also serve as a catalyst for the museum’s “In Dialogue” series of focused exhibitions, which analyze a single work from the permanent collection in the context of an assortment of related works. Tanner’s painting will be the first Terra Foundation object to engage in these conversations, displayed alongside William Edouard Scott’s “Harbor Scene” and Palmer Hayden’s “Boats at the Dock” (on loan from Larry and Brenda Thompson). Tanner, a Black artist who found artistic freedom in France, mentored and encouraged successive generations of Black artists, including Scott, Hayden and William H. Johnson, whose painting will hang nearby.
Beyond their physical display in the galleries, the paintings on loan will play an active role in the museum’s educational and scholarly engagements. The museum will hold public lectures by Nika Elder and Katherine Jentleson, as well as symposia and classroom tours that feature the works, and will incorporate them into interactive elements of the visitor experience. A partnership with UGA’s Historic Clothing and Textile Collection at the College of Family and Consumer Sciences has also allowed the museum to put clothing from various eras into conversation with both the Terra paintings and our collection. We are excited to reexamine works that may have grown familiar to us in the new contexts that these loans and their associated funding afford us.
By Reif Evans
