Conversations With the Collection ― A Terra Foundation

The Terra Foundation for American Art uses its impressive collection of American art spanning a two-hundred-year period to fulfill its mission. Since the Foundation’s establishment in 1978, it has sought to share the collection’s extraordinary pieces by renowned American artists like Mary Cassatt, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Edward Hopper with an international audience, encouraging the study of American art around the world. Conversations with the Collection helps to realize the Foundation’s mission of serving as a “museum without walls,” bringing art and scholarship to a global audience. The handbook entries and scholars’ responses to the artworks that comprise these Conversations provide fascinating insight not only into the collection and its holdings, but also into the Foundation’s history of making these works accessible to art historians and art lovers beyond the United States. The texts achieve a range of objectives, describing the significance of individual pieces in the collection, movements and themes that provide context for these works, and the Foundation’s innovative objective of bringing its collection to an international audience. Indeed, this distinctive handbook demonstrates the success of the Foundation’s mission: the works in its collection have had an impact on worldwide audiences, leading to a richer appreciation for American art.

Katherine M. Bourguignon is curator at the Terra Foundation for American Art, based in Paris, and the author, most recently, of America’s Cool Modernism: O’Keeffe to Hopper. Peter John Brownlee is curator at the Terra Foundation for American Art, based in Chicago, and author of The Commerce of Vision: Optical Culture and Perception in Antebellum America.