Artists Willie Cole and Alison Saar, along with collectors Larry and Brenda Thompson, join us in celebration of the exhibition With Passion and Purpose: Gifts from the Collection of Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson. Over four decades, the Thompsons assembled an extraordinary collection of works by Black artists, many of whom they befriended along the way. Hear their insights about collecting the work of contemporary artists, from both the collectors’ and artists’ perspectives in this conversation moderated by Kanitra Fletcher, the National Gallery’s associate curator of African American and Afro-Diasporic Art, and Shelley Langdale, curator and head of modern and contemporary prints and drawings.  

Willie Cole (born 1955, Somerville, NJ) is a sculptor, printer, and conceptual artist. He attended the Boston University School of Fine Arts, received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York (1976), and continued his studies at the Art Students League of New York (1976-1979). His work combines references to everyday consumer objects and appropriation from African and African American imagery. Cole is well known for his Dada and Surrealist readymades, which assemble and transform ordinary domestic and used objects. His assemblages also relate to other art historical traditions, such as nouveau realism, postmodern eclecticism (funk art), and pop art. His honors include the Inaugural Curlee Raven Holton and Raven Fine Art Editions Distinguished Art Fellowship, Kent State University (2023), the David C. Driskell Prize, High Museum of Art (2006), and the Augustus Saint-Gaudens Memorial Fellowship (2002). He lives and works in Mine Hill, New Jersey.  

Alison Saar (born 1956, Los Angeles, CA) is the daughter of a ceramist and art restorer father, Richard Saar, and an artist mother, Betye Saar. She is a graduate of Scripps College in Claremont, California, and the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, where she lives and works. Over the last 40 years, she has produced a rich body of work made up of sculptures and installations at the crossroads of various cultural influences (Afro-American culture, Caribbean folklore and spirituality, mythology, and art brut) and centered essentially on the identity of Black women in the United States. Saar has also developed a unique printmaking practice, experimenting with woodcut, silkscreen, linocut, and lithography. Echoing her sculptural practice, which incorporates numerous found objects, her prints are sometimes printed on different media—jute sacks, old handkerchiefs and tea towels, etc.—and enriched by collage and chine collé techniques, revealing a surprising material intensity. Several of her sculptures have been installed in public spaces in the United States. In 2024, her work Salon was inaugurated in the Aznavour Garden in Paris to coincide with the Olympic Games. Recently she contributed an outdoor installation to Desert X 2025 in Coachella Valley California.

Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson are art collectors and philanthropists who live in Atlanta and Sea Island, Georgia.  

Larry D. Thompson serves as Counsel to the Atlanta law firm of Finch McCranie, LLP. Mr. Thompson retired in December 2014 as Executive Vice President, Government Affairs, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary for PepsiCo, Inc. Prior to his work at PepsiCo. he served as Deputy Attorney General of the United States from 2001-2003, before which he was a partner in the Atlanta law firm of King & Spalding.  

Dr. Brenda A. Thompson received a Doctor of Philosophy in Clinical Psychology from Saint Louis University in 1980. She was an Assistant Professor at Morehouse College in the Department of Psychology for several years, before focusing on child and adolescent mental health, first as a licensed Clinical Psychologist then as a School Psychologist. Dr. Thompson retired in 2005 after thirty years with the Educational System. Dr. Thompson is a former chair of the Board of Advisors for the Georgia Museum. She also serves on the Barnes Foundation Board, Costal Georgia Historical Society, the Chautauqua Institute African American Heritage House, MSU Broad Museum Collections Committee, and Telfair Collections Committee.

About With Passion and Purpose: Gifts from the Collection of Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson

From compelling portraits to lyrical abstractions, the displayed works echo the passion and purpose with which they were made and collected. Through their patronage as well as their support of exhibitions and scholarship, the Thompsons seek to forefront the creativity of emerging as well as established artists whose work deserves greater recognition. Building on a long tradition of important gifts of art to the National Gallery, the Thompsons’s recent donation comprises the largest group of works by Black artists to enter the collection at once. The exhibition is arranged by broad, interrelated themes that capture the multifaceted concerns of both the Thompsons and the artists: music and abstraction; figuration; civil rights and social justice; landscape; and trans-cultural connections and influences.

Image caption: Alison Saar, Sweeping Beauty, 1997, 3- color woodcut on Okawara Natural Paper, National Gallery of Art, Promised gift of Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson