Larry and Brenda Thompson

Join us for an evening with art collectors Larry and Brenda Thompson. The Thompsons, in conversation with Vradenburg Director and CEO Dorothy Kosinski, will discuss their passion for collecting and the importance of influencing a new generation of collectors of African American art.

Larry and Brenda Thompson have championed acclaimed and lesser-known African American artists for decades. They were personal friends with David Driskell, whose exhibition Two Centuries of Black American Art (1976) informed their own collecting. Driskell’s Black Crucifixion (currently on view in David Driskell: Icons of Nature and History) is part of their remarkable collection. 

The exhibition Tradition Redefined: The Larry and Brenda Thompson Collection of African American Art was organized by the David C. Driskell Center and traveled the US between 2009 and 2014. In 2012, the Thompsons donated all 72 works from Tradition Redefined—including works by Radcliffe Bailey, Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis, Henry Ossawa Tanner, and Hale Woodruff—along with 28 additional works to the Georgia Museum of Art and endowed a curator of African American Art and Art of the Diaspora. In 2017, the Georgia Museum revisited the Thompson collection with the exhibition Expanding Traditions, which documented new works from the Thompsons’ personal collection.