Two years after the death of its founder, the Terra Museum of American Art and its sister institution, the Musee Americain in Giverny, France, are becoming much more open artistically than Daniel J. Terra envisioned.
The sense of the museums as organizations that stood apart from their respective communities expressing the concerns of basically one man has begun to be eroded by a new flexibility regarding exhibitions, acquisitions and outreach.
This change has come by way of the Terra Foundation for the Arts, whose board of trustees will fund the two museums from an endowment of about $400 million. Headed by Arthur Hartmann, a former United States ambassador to Moscow and Paris, the nine-member board appointed last fall a new director for the museum in Chicago, giving him curatorial responsibilities for both venues.
“I think they were looking for me to do something that would extend the possibilities of what had been done with the collection and the buildings,” says John Hallmark Neff, former curator of the First National Bank collection and a previous director of Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art.
“In the past, with few exceptions, the program was focused around the scope of the (permanent) collection. But now the foundation wants to be involved in a comprehensive way in doing things related to American culture both here and abroad, in Chicago and Giverny, and in other venues than just our own. I don’t think there’s anything to limit what the foundation might want to do. At this point, I am making proposals and have had a positive response to them in principle.”
Neff immediately sought to expand what the Terra traditionally had exhibited, taking in work from both North and South America as well as admitting efforts that while not specifically American might still help viewers understand dimensions of our art and culture.
One example is the current showing (through Sunday) of French artist Christian Boltanski’s first project completed in North America, in conjunction with the Lycee francais de Chicago. Working here last February, Boltanski photographed objects that students said were important to their childhood, then requested they embellish and comment on the pictures. In this way, the Lycee gained an original art object that might be sold for its benefit and Chicagoans discovered something about the process of creation in a favored category of contemporary American art, the conceptually oriented photowork.
Similarly, the next show at the Musee Americain in France (June 23 through Oct. 31) will be devoted to pieces by New York contemporary artist Roxy Paine, whose fool-the-eye installations in artificial soil will appear to reflect on the terrain that surrounds the nearby house and garden of Claude Monet, and particularly the fields of poppies that appear in several of his paintings. Nothing quite as challenging had been exhibited there before.
At Terra’s death, about 600 works were in the Chicago museum’s collection. They were mostly paintings, watercolors and monoprints but also a few sculptures and the beginnings of a 19th and 20th Century concentration of lithographs and etchings. This writer recalls a conversation in which the museum founder said he might one day add master photographs, although that was not to be.
“We’ll be doing more with exhibitions of photography,” says Neff. “in part because of a special link to Dan. One of the first things he did as a young man was take out a patent that led to the quick reproduction of photographs and, eventually, the advent of major news magazines. So he helped facilitate photojournalism as we know it. One of our long-term projects is to put together a team to take a fresh look at American photojournalism and dedicate (the results) to Dan.
“Another effort I think we can help is the exhibition and publication of the finest collection of 19th Century American landscape photographs, about 1,600 images owned by a Western American museum. It would be a joint venture involving four or five exhibitions with appropriate catalogs. The foundation has the means to help such projects happen. They don’t have to be exclusively our own. We’d like to do that with institutions in and around Chicago as well.”
There long has been a need here for a sequence of shows to replace the juried exhibitions of artists from Chicago and the immediate vicinity; the last installment that appeared at the Art Institute of Chicago was in May 1985. Neff says the Terra is committed to just such a program, one event every two years. The first effort, organized in collaboration with the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, is up through July 19, presenting works by more than 40 Master of Fine Arts candidates from local universities and art schools. The large number of pieces with a conceptual base has insured that this is most up-to-the-moment art ever exhibited at the museum.
“I think one of the reasons I was brought in,” Neff says, “was because I was not specifically an Americanist. I have a somewhat broader take on these things. In a nice way I would like to have people guessing about what we’re going to do next. I’m going to try to keep a certain amount of anxiety in every exhibition schedule, leaving some parts of each season open so we can be responsive to things that come up or are newly available.”
Neff, who is on a two-year contract that began Sept. 15, is overseeing surveys of conservation, framing and the Michigan Avenue facility. He has asked his department of education to come up with new initiatives for the museum in Chicago. And discussions are proceeding with various universities that might program the Musee Americain to help turn it into an international study center during the seven months it’s open each year.
The most surprising change, however — and the one that underlies all the others, including extended hours, cuts in admission fees and residencies for scholars — has to do not only with bringing what was once perceived as a vanity museum into the center of American art but also envisioning it in a generous role.
“We are looking to form alliances,” Neff says. “We want to see the place become a bridge. We’d like to use its location to make the tourist population that surges up and down North Michigan Avenue aware of the Renaissance Society and the Smart and Block and Dusable museums. We’re going to try to make the lobby an information center.”
Miracle of miracles: a warmer, friendlier Terra than the one Chicago has known.
