What We Do

A silhouette of a person standing in front of a digital artwork by Leo Villareal.

Based in Chicago and Santa Fe, the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation collection includes over 1,600 works and spans four broad fields: Art of the Spanish Americas, Digital & Media Art, Japanese Bamboo, and Post-War Painting & Sculpture.

The Foundation’s programs include:

  • Artwork loans to venues around the world
  • Awards and fellowships to support original scholarship across our collection areas
  • Educational opportunities for learners of all ages, such as lectures, symposia, and class visits to our exhibition spaces
  • Exhibitions at the Foundation spaces: Art Vault in Santa Fe and Orange Door in Chicago
  • Grants to nonprofit organizations for innovative exhibitions, academic programs, convening and publications in our collection areas
Artworks by John Gerrard and Guillermo Galindo on loan to MCA Chicago's exhibit Water After All. Photo by MCA Chicago.

The Foundation has loaned over 1,000 artworks to more than 115 exhibitions across the United States and World.

Select Current Artwork Loans

  • Art Institute of Chicago
  • Denver Art Museum
  • Figge Art Museum
  • Harvard Art Museums
  • Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin
  • New Mexico History Museum
  • Metropolitan Museum of Art
  • Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
  • Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
  • New Museum
  • Oklahoma Contemporary
  • Snite Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame
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Our Collection on Tour

Grants to Nonprofit Organizations

Programming at Amon Carter Museum of American Art's exhibition Set in Motion: Camille Utterback and Art That Moves. Photo by Paul Leicht.

Selected Grants

  • Support of Rhizome’s Net Art Anthology, an online exhibition retelling the history of net art from the 1980s to the present day
  • A three-year grant to the Blanton Museum of Art to support an Associate Curator of Art of the Spanish Americas and a series of short-term research fellowships for Latin American scholars in the same field
  • Support of the Conserving Computer-Based Art (CCBA) initiative, a multi-year project to develop, implement and disseminate new and best practices for the acquisition, preservation, maintenance and display of computer-based new media artworks at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation
  • Funding support over three years for the ChiArts Digital & Electronic Arts Reach Initiative at the Chicago High School for the Arts
  • Support for the September 28, 2018 – April 14, 2019 exhibition Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965-2018 at the Whitney Museum of American Art
  • A grant to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in the to support the catalog for Painted in Mexico, 1700-1790: Pinxit Mexici, the first major exhibition of eighteenth-century New Spanish Painting
  • A grant to the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago for the June 23 – October 14, 2018 exhibition I Was Raised on the Internet
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Congreso de Arte Virreinal: El Futuro del Arte del Pasado symposium in Lima, Peru organized by 2019–20 Marilynn Thoma Fellows Katherine Moore McAllen and Verónica Muñoz-Nájar. Photo by Limas Art+Photography.
  • Marilynn Thoma Fellowship in Art of the Spanish Americas
    Established in 2018, the Marilynn Thoma Fellowship is the only unrestricted research funding in the U.S. devoted exclusively to the field of Art of the Spanish Americas. Postdoctoral fellowships of $60,000 and predoctoral fellowships of $45,000 are granted each year in mid-December to support research projects that range in duration from one to two years.
  • Thoma Foundation Research and Travel Awards in Art of the Spanish Americas
    Each year awards of up to $15,000 are available to scholars, curators, and advanced graduate students completing MA theses or PhD dissertations to help defray the costs of research-related expenses. The awards support projects with a duration of up to six months.
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