Chicago’s Terra Foundation Turns into DEI Central

It uses its millions to inject race grievance into American art. Is this legal?  

I haven’t written about my Chicago visit last month, which involved the festive National Review Institute gala as well as museum visits, especially to the always rewarding Art Institute of Chicago. I’ll review its new exhibition of French 18th-century paintings later on. Since I still have Chicago on my mind, I’ll write today about the Terra Foundation, which is based in Chicago and one of the tiny number of foundations specializing in American art.

Off and on I’ve written about rich foundations such as the Ford and the Mellon Foundations that embrace the toxic ideology based on “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” or DEI. It’s a sweet name for race-baiting and tagging people as either oppressors or victims. It draws from a perversion of history and contempt for American values.

Of all the culture-focused foundations pushing DEI, Terra has got to be the worst. And it sits on $600 million and an exquisite art collection assembled by Daniel Terra (1911–1996), a Chicago ink magnate and, get this, Ronald Reagan’s finance chair in the 1980 election campaign.

I’ve planned to write about Terra, as I’m more and more appalled by how much money and power foundations have acquired and how faddist and political they’ve become. So I took a deep dive into Terra’s history, mission, grants, annual reports, trustees, and 2023 tax return. There’s so much to dislike, first and foremost that I was never able to get any money from Terra for any of my projects when I was a museum director. My sense was that the trustees took care of their buddies and the place always seemed in the middle of changing its priorities. “Win some, lose some” is a good attitude for a fundraiser to have.

But I never dwell on the past. Starting in 2020, Terra changed its mission — yet again — from supporting the dissemination of American art and art history abroad to pushing art history and art exhibitions that are suffused with the rhetoric of the race pimps Black Lives Matter and the 1619 Project. It aims to transform the scholarly field and museum practices generally by foregrounding race and grievance. What it’s doing is reparations, foundation-style.

“We commit to equity and inclusion, where all people belong, are valued, and are treated justly,” its mission reads. “We center racial equity in our values,” which means that all outcomes among racial groups must be the same. It’s a bizarre ethnomania. It’s also anti-human and anti-art in practice and as an ideology since everyone is unique, which means that strengths and flaws differ, but let’s say it’s just another woke preen. And by the by, shouldn’t art center art values?

Nahhh. Art might very well bore the princely paid people at Terra. And there doesn’t seem to be much thought given to quality.

“We acknowledge the harm inflicted by settler colonialism on Native peoples and cultures, the histories of enslavement and anti-Black racism, and the exclusionary practices directed against people of color throughout history and in the present.” And the Terra Foundation is going to do something about it. That’s hardcore woke porn.

“Settler colonialism,” you say? That’s Hamas-speak. In the present? Chicago has a black mayor, though he’s the worst in the country and possibly the universe, and Chicago delivered to us Obama, a clueless bozo who also aimed to transform the country. And we’ve had 60 years of increasingly aggressive affirmative action in academia, business, and government.

Terra also has a pukesome “Land Acknowledgement,” of course, lamenting settler colonialism once more, “structural inequalities in wealth and power,” biases, exclusions, and misrepresentations. Terra aims to make amends to the Odawa, Ojibwe, Menominee, Miami, Peoria, Kickapoo, and Ho-Chunk Nations, so is it wigwams in the Windy City?

Its grantmaking priorities “center artists, scholars, and communities who have been systematically excluded from narratives, practices, and presentations of American art.” It commits to “inclusive and equitable practices across project development and implementation to lead to structural change.”

Does the Terra award grants based on race? It sounds like it. Nearly all of its grants have race-based themes. Is this illegal? It should be if it isn’t. A close look at the in-house criteria of big donors such as the Terra, Mellon, and Ford Foundations would, I suspect, be illuminating and astonishing.

Since I’m portable and curious, and since I write about art for a living, I’ve seen most of the exhibitions Terra has supported. I liked the Marisol retrospective at Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Museum, and Majolica Mania at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore is as mainstream as can be. The Whitney’s Hopper’s New York, which I also liked, got Terra money. Adam Weinberg, the Whitney’s just-retired director, is on the Terra board. Also on the board is Erica Hirshler, the curator of American art at the MFA in Boston, whose splendid Sargent and Fashion exhibition also got Terra money.

Most of Terra’s other exhibitions are among the worst I’ve seen, ever.

Passages in American Art at the Portland Museum of Art in Maine asked Wabanaki DEI lobbyists to reinterpret its distinguished American collection. Portland-made sugar bowls are racist, don’t you know, since they held sugar harvested by slaves. Homer’s Crosscurrents at the Met was about Winslow Homer and American imperialism, a far-fetched topic and so intellectually shoddy that I needed two stories to plumb it. The Peabody Essex Museum’s Terra-funded reinterpretation of its American collection is a bog of tenuous, opportunistic juxtapositions. The great Toledo Museum of Art soiled its diapers in an American-art rehang that’s about white supremacy. Terms such as “Founding Fathers” get scare quotes. Remington gets a warning label. I just saw the Brooklyn Museum’s new reinstallation of its American galleries through a black feminist perspective. A pile of dreck grows in a Brooklyn, and, in 400 objects, grows and grows.

All funded by Terra.

I’m open to new ideas about American art as long as they’re driven by art rather than using art as a prop to indulge clichés about racism, imperialism, gender, and “erasure.” The list of grudges and grievances goes on and on. It’s a yawner agenda. Often it’s formulaic, graduate-student-style, with little original thinking. It’s passive-aggressive art history. You win by pretending to lose. No one wins by teaching young people especially to hate their country. That’s what Terra is doing with its millions.

This brings me back to Dan Terra, whom I met twice in the ’80s when I was in political life and he was America’s ambassador-at-large for culture, a gig he invented for himself and to which President Reagan appointed him as a reward for his fundraising prowess. Terra served for the entirety of Reagan’s term. I was on the Connecticut Commission for the Arts then. He visited a group of us to talk about multiculturalism. DEI was then in its infancy but still not poison. Multiculturalism was starting to appear in grant applications, and some of us, and I was among them, were skeptics, not because of projects that, say, celebrated Latino culture, but because we sensed where it would go, or could very well go. “It’s a lotta garbage,” Terra told us, though he might have said something like “eau de merde” instead. He was Italian-American and the son of immigrants. He believed — passionately — in American exceptionalism and the primacy of assimilation.

Terra’s dead, though, and he didn’t rule from the grave, but it’s safe to say he’d be horrified to see his foundation’s money spent on a grievance agenda. Did donor intent ever give Terra’s masters a moment of hesitation, much less restraint? No. DEI is too hubristic an ideology. It’s powered by righteousness and vanity.

The foundation sits on Dan Terra’s very good collection of American art — about 750 objects — and this in itself is a red flag and imbroglio. There are some exceptionally good things in it, mostly 19th- and early-20th century, bought by Terra in a show of high-end, middlebrow taste. George Bellows’s Palisades, from 1909, is as good as it gets.

Gallery of the Louvre, by Samuel F.B. Morse from the early 1830s, is an icon and the most famous thing in the collection. There’s plenty of very good Hudson River School painting, a gorgeous Whistler pastel, and lots of work by Mary Cassatt, Prendergast, Twachtman, and Theodore Robinson.

Terra initially displayed his collection in a museum named after him in Evanston in Illinois. Dissatisfied with scant visitorship and acclaim, he moved the museum to Chicago, where it flopped not for being the only museum in an outpost town but because it was one of too many in the big city. It closed in 2004. Terra also established a museum of American Impressionism in Giverny in France. This also never worked. American Impressionism is a derivative, clunker style. Why look at it in France when you can see the real, French thing? The foundation unloaded the museum in 2014.

For a few years, part of the collection was displayed at the Art Institute in Chicago. Now, the foundation styles its collection as an art library and makes loans here and there. This is unusual and unideal since most of the art is in storage nearly all the time.

It’s a terrible waste. If the foundation’s passion now is DEI, grievance, revenge, and transformation, Terra’s old landscapes and genre pictures can’t be top of mind. This is an abuse of philanthropy. I suggest that Terra bite the bullet and either transfer the collection to a museum that will display and use it, or build and endow a proper, though focused and small, museum. Northwestern University has a good museum, as does Penn State, where Terra went to college. The Palmer, the museum at Penn State, just built a new home. It’s wrong to keep all that good art in the vault.

Terra supports lots of Chicago art projects with DEI themes, and I can’t say whether they’re good or bad since I don’t know the art scene in the city and its suburbs. It also supports conferences and symposia. I’ve been to so many academic gab fests over the years, and most of them are a waste of time. In 2023, Terra partnered with the Getty, Mellon, and Ford Foundations to distribute $5 million over time to support curatorial positions in “Latinx” art, a term hated by nearly all people with Central American and South American heritage, but loved by left-wing gringos.

Sharon Corwin is the Terra Foundation’s president. I first met her when she was a new, young curator at the Colby College Museum of Art. She eventually became the museum’s director and led the drive for what I think is a wonderful new building, both practical and handsome. She went to Terra and, evidently, drank the woke voodoo juice.

It takes both staff and the trustees to botch an institution. My only quibble about her as a curator is a proneness to a narrow agenda, in her case the art movements related to her dissertation. A catholic view is essential when it comes to American art, which is as vast in topics and spirit as the country itself.

The staff is big — at 28 people, according to Terra’s website — and spread over Chicago and Paris offices. Terra has an outpost in Paris in collaboration with Custodia Foundation. I wrote about the Custodia’s enchanting exhibition of small European landscape sketches a couple of years ago. It’s a gallery known to connoisseurs but not many others. Terra shares its art library, likely the best private library in France. Given its new DEI mission, I don’t know what Terra’s Paris profile is meant to accomplish aside from maintaining a residue of the old mission, and, well, Paris is Paris.

A smaller staff would seem more economically efficient and appropriate for a foundation, which ought to maximize its giving, but, with Terra’s new mission, do we really want this? The board is a mix of museum directors and curators, race-focused academics, and trustees from the DEI wing of the corporate world. Stephanie Field Harris is the new board chairwoman. The board’s members are on other boards in the little world of elite foundations, which seems more and more like an echo chamber.

Terra’s a piker in wealth but no less destructive since, odd to say, there are only a few foundations specializing in American art, which is not an easy subject for fundraising.

The Luce Foundation and a few smaller foundations and, of course, Terra are the whole pool. Looking at the big, multi-billion-dollar foundations like Mellon, Ford, MacArthur, and Packard, I have to say they have too much money given their present state of DEI hypnosis. I assume that, one day, the government will be truly broke and empty their coffers, along with those of the big universities, much as Henry VIII, Napoleon, and Lenin swiped monastery money. Since we print whatever we need, Washington won’t be destitute tomorrow, but with a new sheriff headed to town, isn’t it time for a salutary squeeze?

And foundations, like every other organized human endeavor, need to ditch DEI. Libertarian that I am, I still know it’ll take the government to badda-boom it out of them. Terra’s no behemoth, and its focus is narrow as foundations go. A good place to start.