Thompsons’ collection exhibited in National Gallery of Art

Karen Kistler

karen.kistler@salisburyppost.com

Brenda and Larry Thompson began their journey of being art collectors after being introduced to a special collection of American art in Atlanta and later searching for those artists and today are sharing some of those pieces with the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

The exhibit features 60 pieces of art that the Thompsons have collected and have gifted to the gallery.

In a release from the gallery, it was noted that “With Passion and Purpose: Gifts from the Collection of Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson features a selection of some 60 works from more than 170 that the Thompsons have donated or pledged as gifts to the National Gallery of Art.” It will remain on display until Oct. 6 after which time, some of the pieces, said Brenda, will remain and be included in another exhibit, others will rotate out but remain at the gallery while some will come back home to them for a while. But they are all promised gifts to the gallery.

“Some are outright gifts and some are promised gifts to be given later,” said Larry, adding that these pieces “now belong to the National Gallery of Art, actually they belong to the country.”

In the release from the gallery, Kaywin Feldman, director of the National Gallery of Art said that “this exhibition celebrates the spirit and passion of Larry and Brenda Thompson whose remarkable dedication to collecting important American art is profound. The breadth of artistic achievement across media and styles in this transformative gift enriches the story of American art that we can share with our visitors.”

Brenda said that more than 80,000 people have viewed the exhibit so far.

When it opened, the couple went to the National Gallery of Art on June 10 and both made remarks during the opening event along with the director and curator of the museum.

Many of the artists and the families who were close by were able to attend the event, which drew more than 200 people.

“The National Gallery did a really nice opening,” she said.

The Thompsons were invited back about three weeks ago to participate in a conversation with two of the artists in the exhibit, Alison Saar and Willie Cole.

Brenda is from Salisbury, and lived there all of her life she said, until she graduated from Price High School.

From there, she went to North Carolina Central in Durham after which she went to graduate school at Michigan State University in East Lansing, which is where she met Larry.

Larry, she said, is from Hannibal, Missouri, and attended college at Culver-Stockton College in Canton, Missouri after which he went to Michigan State.

Brenda graduated with a degree in psychology from N.C. Central and when she went to Michigan State, she received a masters in counseling and then went back for her PhD in psychology at St. Louis University in Missouri, and Larry went on to law school at the University of Michigan.

It was after they finished their degrees, said Brenda, that they decided to move to Atlanta.

While in Missouri, Larry was taken under the wings of a couple who introduced him to collecting art and after they got to Atlanta, the couple began considering being collectors as well.

In Atlanta, Brenda said they were introduced to this wonderful collection of some of the best American art in the country. “Its focus was African-American but it was American art, and we got to see these wonderful pieces.” 

She shared the background of these pieces noting that Atlanta University is a graduate school and during the years when African-Americans didn’t have the opportunity to be in competitions, she said, they started their own competition and they called it The Annuals because it was every year. It’s now called the Clark Atlanta Annuals. There were prizes awarded in painting, prints and sculpture and so there were first-, second- and third-place prizes and they were prizes that became a part of the Clark Atlanta Collection. 

Brenda said collecting “gave us a chance to be absorbed by something else, by the beauty of the work and all of our works are not figurative, many are abstract, some are sculptural, some are conceptual, so we have a mixture of what we collect. But it allows us to appreciate the aesthetics of something else beyond ourselves.”

Before they gifted these pieces to the National Gallery of Art, she said they had given 100 pieces to the University of Georgia Museum, the state where they currently live.

About three years ago, she said the gallery came to them and asked if they would consider giving some to the country at the National Gallery.

“That’s a pretty hard thing to say no to. So we decided we would do it and they came in over a period of two to three years with two curators and director and other people and they made decisions on what pieces they thought would complement their collection and would be important to tell the story, the history of American art.” 

Being able to share these works, said Brenda, is very special.

“It was kind of a culmination of you collect it because you enjoy it,” she said, “but there’s also this quality when you collect it you want people to see the beauty of the work.”

Plus they are happy to help the artists and provide that opportunity for people to see their work.

“In a way, it’s our way of giving back. In some ways we feel like by doing it we preserve history, we deepen the understanding of the stories the artists might have been trying to tell us. Perhaps it was cultural pride but I think more than anything else what we wanted to do, having gone to Price High School where there was always this real sense of pride, it was a sense of preserving history and culture.”

Knowing they had to have a plan of what to do with their collection, what they have done is placing them there so people can remember the artists and their work and were placing it there for safe keeping.

And the National Gallery has done an excellent job with the exhibit and how they have grouped the pieces, as she noted that some represent music, and there’s another area of portraiture, another of civil rights, others about landscapes. They chose themes and hung the work according to that, she said.

Larry said they have been “lucky to be able to have the means to collect a large amount of art by African-American artists and we’re lucky to be able to give it to our nation.”

He said he thought that Brenda is “probably one of the most knowledgeable amateur art experts in the history of African-American artists that I know. She has immersed herself in this field.”

As far as the collection, Larry said with a laugh that he is “only the chief financial officer of the Thompson collection. Brenda is the chief procurement officer.”

As for a favorite piece, Brenda said that is hard to say,

“That’s like asking who’s your favorite child,” she said with a laugh.

Larry likewise spoke of the pieces as their children when he said that seeing the artwork on the walls at the gallery, his reaction was that “it was amazing. They did an amazing job, a very professional job hanging the art for the exhibition. It really looked wonderful.”

However, he added that it was also bittersweet because I view these pieces of art as our children and I miss them already and I actually missed them more when I saw them hanging on the walls of the National Gallery of Art and not in our home.”