Ackland’s newest exhibition features a breadth of artworks from the Terra Foundation

On Jan. 31, the Ackland Art Museum opened the “Triple Take: Dialogues with the Terra Collection-in-Residence” exhibition. This three-part exhibit includes pieces loaned from the Terra Foundation for American Art and from the Ackland galleries. 

Back in 2022, the Terra Foundation invited the Ackland to participate in a new program called the Collection-in-Residence, which allows museums all over the country, including the Ackland, to temporarily display pieces. The Ackland currently has four paintings from the foundation. 

The Terra Foundation gets their pieces by both purchasing them at auctions and receiving them as gifts. The pieces are then distributed to museums. 

The foundation itself did not curate the exhibition, but loaned the pieces to the Ackland for display, Taylor Poulin, associate curator and associate collection program officer of the Terra Foundation, said. 

“Through all of these, all this work that we do, we share stories that expand understanding of American art through exhibitions, programs and projects that we do,” Poulin said.

The Ackland specifically requested these four pieces, and through the exhibit, the pieces can now be shared with the Chapel Hill community in a new way.

Since the Ackland loaned the pieces for four years, it will utilize the pieces in a variety of exhibits, Lauren Turner, the associate curator for contemporary art and special projects at the museum, said. She also said that the four paintings complement other loans already displayed in the Ackland. 

“The analogy that our deputy director likes to use is [that] they're acting as magnets to works that we already own,” Turner said.

Two paintings from the Terra Foundation were placed in one room and two in another. These pieces from the Terra Foundation were then surrounded by various related objects from the museum. Each section of the exhibit has about 20 pieces, acting as almost three miniature exhibitions, Turner said, with two of those sections containing the foundation’s paintings. 

These three sections focus on different topics. Specifically, one section dedicated to the biography of artist Lyonel Feininger, another section with works depicting children and the last demonstrating people’s relationship to mirrors and the concept of implied participation. 

“A major theme is just that there are so many different ways to approach the interpretation of an artwork, and so there are so many avenues from which we could have done it differently,” Dana Cowen, Sheldon Peck Curator for European and American Art before 1950 at the museum, said. 

One reason there are many different ways to curate this exhibition is because it contains a breadth of works, such as paintings, prints, sculptures, photographs, books and drawings. There are also multiple featured artists, including Archibald Motley, an African American artist that celebrated African American culture during the Jazz Age. While a lot of these pieces are from the early 21st century, some are from earlier, including one from the 1540s. 

The Ackland’s education team took this idea that there are many ways to curate an exhibition and created an online tool where visitors can curate their own exhibitions based on a piece from the Terra Collection based around a central theme or idea. 

Other Terra Foundation pieces are displayed in academic museums all over the world, including the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England, the Museum der bildenden Küntse Leipzig in Leipzig, Germany and now, the Ackland. The Triple Take exhibition will be open to the public until May 11.

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