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This event provided an opportunity for local growers and exporters, importers, retailers and business solution providers to network and learn ways to improve and grow their businesses. Programming include how to improve productivity through technology and innovation, with a focus on addressing issues like increased labor costs and labor shortages.
With Madison County?s famed Roseman Bridge behind him, author Robert James Waller tapes a Travel Channel segment in 2002 on visits to places that have connections to movies. Waller?s novel, ?The Bridges of Madison County,? brought worldwide attention to the covered bridges. REGISTER FILE PHOTO
"CONNECTIONS" A collaborative group exhibition between den contemporary art and OVERTONES, including ten Los Angeles-based artists. January 17-February 28, 2009 @ OVERTONES, L.A.
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With Passion and Purpose
Gifts from the Collection of Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson
June 7 - October 5, 2025
Locations East Building, Mezzanine — Gallery 214
See standout works by Black artists from the past century, newly gifted to the Nation.
For over four decades, Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson have championed the work of Black artists. They have supported exhibitions and scholarship as they built a remarkable collection that spans 100 years of Black creativity in America.
This exhibition celebrates the recent and promised gifts of 175 works from the Thompsons to the National Gallery—the largest group of objects by Black artists to enter our collection at one time. Explore more than 60 paintings, sculpture, drawings, and prints organized in sections around themes of music and abstraction, figuration and portraiture, civil rights and social politics, as well as landscape and transcultural connections and influences.
Works range from a captivating portrait by Beauford Delaney and lyrical abstractions by Mildred Thompson to a towering allegorical woodcut by Alison Saar and an intricate sculpture of found objects by vanessa german. Enjoy works by renowned artists—Jacob Lawrence, Archibald Motley, and Kara Walker—and discover artists you may not yet know, such as Camille Billops, Vivian Browne, Moe Brooker, and Alonzo Davis.
www.nga.gov/exhibitions/passion-and-purpose
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"In April of this year, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC announced that it received a substantial gift of more than one hundred seventy artworks by Black American artists from art collectors Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson. “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,” Kaywin Feldman, director of the National Gallery of Art, stated in the press release. The National Gallery of Art collection includes one hundred sixty thousand artworks that span the history of Western art from the Middle Ages to the contemporary moment, but although the collection covers a huge period of time, its holdings are not as diverse as the people who live and work in the Western world. The Thompsons’ gift is the largest gift of Black art the museum has ever received, and because Western art is so heavily Eurocentric, the Thompsons’ gift is, indeed, “transformative”—and vital.
The exhibition With Passion and Purpose: Gifts from the Collection of Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson, on view at the museum until October 5, features sixty paintings and sculptures from the collection. The donation spans one hundred years and features works by well-known artists, including Jacob Lawrence and Kara Walker, and more obscure artists like Moe Booker and Alonzo Davis. The collection is diverse in style, subject matter, and genre, featuring representational portraits to abstract paintings.
The four galleries that make up With Passion and Purpose are curated by Kanitra Fletcher, associate curator of African American and Afro-Diasporic Art; Shelley Langdale, curator and head of the department of modern prints and drawings; Claudia Watts, research assistant; and Emily Wehby, curatorial assistant, all of the National Gallery of Art. Vibrant abstract works greet the viewer upon arrival, setting up for a dynamic exhibition of varied artistic styles and subjects. While many artworks express narratives about Black America, not all of them take on such an arduous task; others celebrate beauty and joy. Artworks like Mento, 1968 by Mavis Pusey and Untitled, 1971 by Daniel LaRue Johnson exude the transformative nature of the post-civil rights moment they were created in. Other artworks like Sweeping Beauty, 1997 by Alison Saar and New York Rail, 1993 by Radcliffe Bailey illustrate Black life by expressing narratives that speak to harsh historical realities.
Sweeping Beauty, a woodcut on Okawara Natural Paper, depicts the figure of a pregnant nude woman positioned upside down, rendered in yellow pigment against a red and black background. The play on the classic children’s story Sleeping Beauty is evident, but Saar subverts the stereotypical female figure who is required to be chaste and dainty. The bold colors defy misogynist desires for women to be demure. For Black women, being modest was not always a choice, as from the time African women stepped onto American soil in the 1600s, they were relegated to chattel, and poked, prodded, and examined as such. Saar’s artwork of the nude figure might be also reckoning with the reality that Black women for so long were domestics made to clean and sweep. In these roles, Black women were not respected for their full humanity, and they were often forced to succumb to unwanted advances from their enslavers and bosses. Saar’s artwork is layered: her depiction of a fertility goddess highlights the notion that Black women birthed a workforce, and the figure’s hair sweeping the floor alludes to domestic servitude.
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With Passion and Purpose: Black Collectors Complicate Western Art Culture
on artessay
Shantay Robinson
Alison Saar
Sweeping Beauty,1997
3-color woodcut on Okawara Natural Paper
overall: 193.04 × 83.82 cm (76 × 33 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Promised Gift of Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson
© Alison Saar. Courtesy of L.A. Louver, Venice, CA
In April of this year, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC announced that it received a substantial gift of more than one hundred seventy artworks by Black American artists from art collectors Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson. “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,” Kaywin Feldman, director of the National Gallery of Art, stated in the press release. The National Gallery of Art collection includes one hundred sixty thousand artworks that span the history of Western art from the Middle Ages to the contemporary moment, but although the collection covers a huge period of time, its holdings are not as diverse as the people who live and work in the Western world. The Thompsons’ gift is the largest gift of Black art the museum has ever received, and because Western art is so heavily Eurocentric, the Thompsons’ gift is, indeed, “transformative”—and vital.
The exhibition With Passion and Purpose: Gifts from the Collection of Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson, on view at the museum until October 5, features sixty paintings and sculptures from the collection. The donation spans one hundred years and features works by well-known artists, including Jacob Lawrence and Kara Walker, and more obscure artists like Moe Booker and Alonzo Davis. The collection is diverse in style, subject matter, and genre, featuring representational portraits to abstract paintings.
The four galleries that make up With Passion and Purpose are curated by Kanitra Fletcher, associate curator of African American and Afro-Diasporic Art; Shelley Langdale, curator and head of the department of modern prints and drawings; Claudia Watts, research assistant; and Emily Wehby, curatorial assistant, all of the National Gallery of Art. Vibrant abstract works greet the viewer upon arrival, setting up for a dynamic exhibition of varied artistic styles and subjects. While many artworks express narratives about Black America, not all of them take on such an arduous task; others celebrate beauty and joy. Artworks like Mento, 1968 by Mavis Pusey and Untitled, 1971 by Daniel LaRue Johnson exude the transformative nature of the post-civil rights moment they were created in. Other artworks like Sweeping Beauty, 1997 by Alison Saar and New York Rail, 1993 by Radcliffe Bailey illustrate Black life by expressing narratives that speak to harsh historical realities.
Sweeping Beauty, a woodcut on Okawara Natural Paper, depicts the figure of a pregnant nude woman positioned upside down, rendered in yellow pigment against a red and black background. The play on the classic children’s story Sleeping Beauty is evident, but Saar subverts the stereotypical female figure who is required to be chaste and dainty. The bold colors defy misogynist desires for women to be demure. For Black women, being modest was not always a choice, as from the time African women stepped onto American soil in the 1600s, they were relegated to chattel, and poked, prodded, and examined as such. Saar’s artwork of the nude figure might be also reckoning with the reality that Black women for so long were domestics made to clean and sweep. In these roles, Black women were not respected for their full humanity, and they were often forced to succumb to unwanted advances from their enslavers and bosses. Saar’s artwork is layered: her depiction of a fertility goddess highlights the notion that Black women birthed a workforce, and the figure’s hair sweeping the floor alludes to domestic servitude.
Radcliffe Bailey
NY Rail (Transportation), 1993
cut-and-pasted offset printed paper and painted paper, acrylic paint, and blue crayon on wove paper
sheet: 45.8 x 58.9 cm (18 1/16 x 23 3/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Gift of Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson
2023.145.14
Radcliffe Bailey, who passed away in 2023 and is known for telling Black American narratives through his artwork, is represented here by the six separate paintings that make up his NY Rail. Like Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series, this artwork depicts the migration of Black people from the south and the Caribbean to parts of the United States. For NY Rail (Transportation), Bailey uses an archival photograph of Black people boarding a train, overlayed with a grid of colorful acrylic paint and a depiction of tree limbs with leaves. In NY Rail (Boats Arriving), he paints three and a half row boats, with the word “Mississippi,” “Jamaica,” and “Cuba” written on the sides of them, telling where and how Black people migrated. The background is in coordination with the other paintings in the series, as they incorporate the orange, blue, yellow, and green painted horizontal stripes depicting water and the landscape. In other artworks, NY Rail (Bird of Death) and NY Rail (Death of Infant), the artist illustrates the unfortunate trials faced during the migration. Though optimism drove the migrants, they still faced challenges that led to death in Northern cities, from mob violence to unhealthy environments in ghettos.
Without the stewardship of Black art collectors from the beginning of the early twentieth century when Black art burgeoned due to the New Negro Movement, commonly known as the Harlem Renaissance, the preservation of Black art would not have happened, and the art would be lost. During the early twentieth century, instead of exhibiting in downtown New York museums and galleries, Black artists exhibited their work in libraries, churches, and private homes. In 1921, the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library in Harlem held its first exhibition by African American artists. The library became a focal point for the Harlem Renaissance. Today, the library is known as the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, after Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, who was fundamental to the movement and in 1926 contributed his collection of more than four thousand books to the library for $10,000 furnished by the Carnegie Corporation. Black American artists were excluded from the art establishment largely until the mid to late twentieth century when postmodern conceptual art started to become popular. Because of this exclusion, museum collections around the country lack art that represents historical Black narratives. But today, museums are beginning to acquire art that fills the historical gaps in their collections through the generosity of collectors like the Thompsons, University of Georgia emeritus trustees, who have been collecting art since 1980. In 2011, they donated one hundred artworks to the Georgia Museum of Art, and in 2008, they gifted thirty nine artworks to the David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland, College Park. Collectors Walter O. and Linda Evans, who hold one of the largest collections of Black art, gifted the Telfair Museums thirty artworks; Seteria and Najee Dorsey, founders of Black Art in America, gifted the Columbus Museum fifteen artworks; and Constance E. Clayton, an educator and civic leader who collected Black art over fifty years, gifted the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art more than seventy artworks.
Without Black art collectors, so much of the artwork by Black artists would be forgotten. With the loss of the physical art, the impalpable sensibilities of Black life throughout varied stages of history would not be preserved. Black collectors have cared for their collections and also contributed to the dissemination of the art and ideas through gifts to institutions that benefit from the inclusion of Black history. These Black collectors who steward Black art are making judgments on what should be preserved in a field that is dominated by western culture’s Eurocentric gaze. And though Black collectors have gifted historically Black institutions, including Clark Atlanta University, Hampton Unviersity, and Howard University, with artworks throughout African American art’s history, it is notable that the Thompsons are Black collectors making a profound contribution to one of the most highly regarded collections in the United States—the National Gallery of Art.
Shantay Robinson, educator and art writer, lives in Northern Virginia. Her work has appeared regularly in ARTnews, Smithsonian Magazine, Black Art in America, and other notable publications where she primarily writes about Black Art. She holds a PhD in Writing and Rhetoric from George Mason University."
hopkinsreview.com/features/with-passion-and-purpose-shant...
Connections like this obviously have lots of tolerance, but they always seem to me like they're holding on for dear life...
Photos from our annual Connections conference for MBA recruiters and career service office professionals.
Celtic Connection ( M64) Strathspey/Reel
The painting depicts b33-40 Set to & turn partner
Wikipedia lists 1,688 sources, from all over the world, for Celtic Connection: festvals, concerts, folk dances, DVDs, radio shows.
Could our unknown devisor have been so inspired at a Celtic Connection event that he/she celebrated the occasion by creating a dance of the name.
A Rural Connection
Bridges Of Madison County
Near Winterset, IA
July 2010
The last of my "bridge" shots, but have a few others from the area that won't include the actual bridges in the shots.
Keyboard, mouse, USB and network.
Strobist: sb800 low front left, Camray into white umbrella high front right.
Sophomore Career Connections, Linking the Liberal Arts to the World of Work, Keynote featuring Ilyse Hogue ’91, Former President, NARAL Pro-Choice America, Vassar College, January 12, 2024
Photo credit: Karl Rabe/Vassar College
Sophomore Career Connections, Linking the Liberal Arts to the World of Work, Keynote featuring Ilyse Hogue ’91, Former President, NARAL Pro-Choice America, Vassar College, January 12, 2024
Photo credit: Karl Rabe/Vassar College
The 11th annual Sophomore Career Connections: Linking the Liberal Arts to the World of Work, hosted collaboratively by the Center for Career Education and the Office of Advancement. Networking Reception: During the reception, students practice their networking skills with mentors in a safe environment, Vassar College, January 19, 2025.
Photo credit: Kelly Marsh/Vassar College
I had all kinds of ideas for this one. It started out as two pieces (halves, I guess), that I wanted to leave behind at two different places for two different people, and tell them on the back to go here to find the other half. I wanted to make a connection between two strangers. But I didn't like the way it looked, so I started over again and ended up with this little wired piece. I was trying to show the different connections we can have: some of them rusty, some shiny, some rather loose, some not really pretty but nevertheless connections. If you connect the dots in the center you'll get a heart, of course (in case you haven't had that figured out, yet :o)). And the heart button symbolizes Love as well as Connection (being a button, which are usually used to connect things). At the top it says "Be Connected" and on the tag is a quote from my cup of yogi tea that I enjoyed while making the piece: Where there is love, there is no question. Weird coincidence, huh?
I left it on a gate at Domaine Alfred, a winery that makes biodynamic wine. I think the girl that works there must have taken it, since she closed the gate while we were there (we were almost the last ones in their wine tasting room.)
MCP 52/34 Connections
Our kids are all adults now and we don't get much time to spend as a family. My daughter, Kestrel, insisted we go to the beach. So we all went to Dillion Beach on the CA coast. Here are my two daughters trying to keep their dad from getting the football! What a great day :)
Premed Connection is a free application that lets you connect with students, share your journey to medicine, and discover more about the things that matter in a premeds life. - See more at: www.preapps.com/new-iphone-apps/premed-connection/4108