Terri Yoho

Terri Yoho served as Executive Director of Kohler Foundation, Inc. from 1999 until early 2018, a roughly 19-year tenure. She was succeeded by Christine Taylor, whose appointment was announced on January 9, 2018. The Kohler Foundation, based in Kohler, Wisconsin, is a private foundation known nationally for the preservation of art and "art environments," along with grantmaking, scholarships, the Distinguished Guest Series, and stewardship of properties such as the Waelderhaus. Yoho was also the administrator of the Kohler Trust for Arts and Education and the Kohler Trust for Preservation, and a strong supporter of the John Michael Kohler Arts Center.

In her role she managed the Foundation's preservation program, which focused on art environments and objects created by self-taught and folk artists, as well as folk art, architecture, and other collections of historic, aesthetic, or cultural interest. Under her leadership the Foundation became one of the country's leading funders and stewards of large-scale vernacular art environments — work that typically involves conserving a site and then gifting it to a local nonprofit or public steward.

According to secondary sources, Yoho holds an MS from Marquette University and a bachelor's degree from Lakeland College (now Lakeland University, in Plymouth, WI), and earlier in her career held library-leadership roles. After retiring from the Kohler Foundation, she has served as an Advisor to the Ruth Foundation for the Arts (Ruth Arts) — a Milwaukee-based grantmaker that in 2022 became steward of an approximately $440 million trust and practices artist-led, participatory grantmaking.

She has been a recurring public speaker on art conservation and preservation, including as a featured presenter at the 2015/2017 "Divine Disorder" conference on the conservation of folk and self-taught art, and in video features on projects such as Emery Blagdon's "Healing Machine."

• Funds preservation, not startups. Yoho's "investment" philosophy is philanthropic: rescuing, conserving, and permanently preserving at-risk art environments and self-taught/folk-art collections, then transferring them to public or nonprofit stewards.
• Sector: visual art, folk/outsider/vernacular art, art environments, architecture of cultural significance, and arts education.
• Approach: the Kohler Foundation model pairs hands-on conservation (engaging professional conservators) with grants, scholarships, and long-term stewardship — favoring projects of "historic, aesthetic, and/or cultural interest."
• Geography: national in reach but anchored in Wisconsin; preservation projects have spanned multiple states.
• No stated thesis around equity checks, seed rounds, or startup company profiles was found in any source.