Couple Donates Collection of African-American Works to Georgia Museum of Art:
“GEORGIA, USA—Part-time Atlantans Larry and Brenda Thompson, who have amassed one of the country’s major private collections of African-American art, are donating 100 works to the Georgia Museum of Art, with the promise of more in the future, and they also will fund a new curatorial position at the Athens museum.
A large touring exhibit drawn from the Thompsons’ collection helped open the museum’s $20 million, 30,000-square-foot expansion last year. And museum board Chairman Carl Mullis called the couple’s contributions, being announced today exclusively in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, ‘transformative’ for the official state art museum of Georgia.
‘It is truly an amazing gift to the museum, to the University of Georgia and to all the people of Georgia,’ said Mullis, an Atlanta attorney. Included in the donation are pieces by Hale Woodruff, Beauford Delaney, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Wadsworth Jarrell and Radcliffe Bailey.
It was Eiland’s idea that the couple endow the full-time curatorial position, the Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson Curator of the African Diaspora. The yet-to-be appointed academic professional will oversee all the museum’s African-American and African art holdings, develop special exhibits and educational offerings, conduct research and publish.”
(Via Art & Education » News.)