The Georgia Museum of Art received a gift of over 100 pieces of art from the collection of Larry and Brenda Thompson. An endowment for a new curatorial position — the Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson Curator of the African Diaspora — is a part of the gift. Part of a touring exhibit that opened the Athens, Georgia-based museum’s $20 million, 30,000-square-foot expansion last year, the gift includes pieces by Radcliffe Bailey, Hale Woodruff, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Beauford Delaney, and Wadsworth Jarrell.
When repeatedly asked why such a gift was going to Georgia, Larry Thompson, a former U.S. deputy attorney general based in Atlanta and retired general counsel and secretary for PepsiCo, said during a collector’s tour of his and Mrs. Thompson’s home in Greenwich, Conn., home, “We lived in Georgia for 30 years, and so much of who I am is Georgia.”
Mr. Thompson’s law career started in Georgia. He and Mrs. Thompson, a retired Atlanta Public School psychologist, raised their two sons in the state.
