Conversations With the Collection: A Terra Foundation Collection Handbook

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.

Peter John Brownlee is associate curator at the Terra Foundation for American Art.

Katherine M. Bourguignon is associate curator at the Musée d’Art Américain Giverny, where she is organizing the exhibition Impressionist Giverny: A Colony of Artists, 1885-1915. She has conducted research into a variety of transatlantic ties among American and European artists and acted as curator for several exhibitions devoted to American art. She received a PhD in art history from the University of Pennsylvania in 1998 and currently lives in France.