Des Moines Art Center Receives $150,000 Grant from the Henry Luce Foundation
9/29/2025DES MOINES, IOWA (September 2025) – The Des Moines Art Center has been awarded a $150,000 Responsive Grant from the Henry Luce Foundation’s American Art Program to support a ground-breaking exhibition, “Whisper to a Scream: Women Artists and Minimalism,” which is slated to be on view from early to mid-2027.
Over the last 43 years, the Henry Luce Foundation’s American Art Program has awarded more than $240 million in grants to museums and art organizations in all fifty states, in support of exhibitions, publications, collections, and scholarly training. The Program has enabled the field to expand the definition of American art and to develop ethical approaches to collecting and exhibiting art. This marks the Des Moines Art Center’s first grant from the Foundation in over a decade.
The Responsive Grant will provide critical support for “Whisper to a Scream: Women Artists and Minimalism,” a major exhibition inspired by a key group of works in the Art Center’s permanent collection. For the first time, the show will bring together a multigenerational group of female-identified artists — most of whom are American — who have played an important role in establishing and evolving minimalist abstraction as one of the dominant visual vocabularies of the 20th and 21st centuries.
This exhibition will highlight a broad spectrum of women painters, sculptors, and interdisciplinary artists who have often been overlooked or underrecognized in the narrative of art history. Rooted in works from the Art Center’s collection, the show will feature selections from the collection of Louise Rosenfield Noun, a Des Moines-based collector, philanthropist, activist, and historian of both art and feminism who played a foundational role in the Art Center’s history.
With this grant, the Art Center will be able to secure strategic loans of art to accompany the exhibition, publish a scholarly catalogue providing deeper insight into its themes, and offer a series of enriching public educational and community programs, furthering its reach to new audiences.
“We are delighted to have received an award from the esteemed Henry Luce Foundation,” said Dr. Kelly Baum, John and Mary Pappajohn Director and Chief Executive Officer. “Just as the Foundation is committed to education, creative expression, and public dialogue, so too is the Art Center. This exhibition reflects our vision to be a public forum for the exchange of knowledge and ideas about art. Conceptualized by Senior Curator Laura Burkhalter, ‘Whisper to a Scream: Women Artists and Minimalism’ will encourage new discourse on the evolution of minimalist abstraction by women artists. We extend our sincerest gratitude to the Henry Luce Foundation, its staff, board of directors, and grant reviewers for this monumental opportunity.”
