Washington, DC—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. For more than four decades, Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson have collected exceptional works of art predominantly made by Black American artists. Through their patronage and support of exhibitions and scholarship, the Thompsons have contributed both to the visibility and appreciation of emerging artists and to the reassessment of established but previously underrecognized artists. Representing a wide array of media, subject matter, and styles, from figurative and abstract to conceptual approaches, the exhibition showcases the work of 57 artists, including Benny Andrews, Radcliffe Bailey, John Thomas Biggers, Elizabeth Catlett, David Driskell, and Kara Walker. Artists such as Camille Billops, Vivian Browne, Hughie Lee-Smith, Sam Middleton, and Mavis Pusey, whose work is receiving increasing recognition in museums and art historical scholarship, are also featured. The exhibition is on view from June 7 to October 5, 2025, in the East Building of the National Gallery.

“This exhibition celebrates the spirit and passion of Larry and Brenda Thompson whose remarkable dedication to collecting important American art is profound,” said Kaywin Feldman, director of the National Gallery of Art. “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.”

About the Exhibition

Organized thematically, from compelling portraits to lyrical abstractions, the works on view in the exhibition reflect the multifaceted interests of both the Thompsons and the artists whose work is featured. Key themes and motifs include music, abstraction, figuration, portraiture, civil rights, landscape, and cross-cultural connections.

The first room explores the influence of music on the featured artists, many of whom enjoyed close relationships with musicians and expressed their admiration through portraiture. Others responded visually through narrative imagery related to songs and performance or through abstract styles stirred by sound, rhythm, and expressive feeling. Highlights include Elizabeth Catlett’s bronze sculpture Mahalia (2002), a tribute to singer Mahalia Jackson, an iconic figure in 20th-century gospel music. Portrayed in elegant repose, the figure’s head tilts upward as if singing to the heavens. With a vibrant palette, textured surface, and simplified form, Beauford Delaney painted a portrait of Walter Anderson, a distinguished musician and educator who served as director of music programs at the National Endowment for the Arts throughout the 1970s. In Mento (1968), Mavis Pusey pays homage to the musical heritage of Jamaica, her homeland, with bold, colorful interlocking shapes. Rose Piper’s painting Young Woman Blues (c. 1947), inspired by Bessie Smith’s ballad of the same title, illustrates the emotional depth and struggles of young Black women in an intimate moonlit scene. Expatriate artist Sam Middleton, who spent most of his life in the Netherlands, explored the syncopation of jazz music in the lively collages of his Jazz Series (1993) that incorporate scraps of musical scores with imagery of musicians, colorful geometric forms, and calligraphic lines.

The second room delves into various portrayals of the human figure. Notable pieces include James Hiram Malone’s Stevedore (1958), a lively depiction of a figure engaged in strenuous labor at a shipyard, and Alison Saar’s monumental woodcut, Sweeping Beauty (1997), which pays homage to the strength and fortitude of Black women. A wall of portraits of everyday people demonstrates the artists’ awareness of the power of portraiture to convey respect and recognition of Black lives and experiences that have been historically underrepresented in major public collections.  Among these portraits are Charles Alston’s intimate Head of a Girl (1960), a lovingly depicted visage of a young sitter rendered realistically despite Alston’s adoption of abstraction in the 1950s, and a striking linocut by Elizabeth Catlett titled Black Girl (1946), the first print in her renowned series The Black Woman. Notably, the impression of Black Girl on view in the exhibition belonged to Catlett’s friend Margaret Burroughs, a prominent artist and the co-founder of the South Side Community Center in Chicago, which provided essential support for Black artists.

The interrelated topics of civil rights, history, and social issues are addressed in the works on display in the third room. Among the featured works are Poverty (1990) by Benny Andrews from his America Series, which explores subtle layers of the American experience through portrayals of people from all aspects of society. A sense of journey carries through the suite of six works on paper, NY Rail (1993), in which Radcliffe Bailey explores the ancestry, migration, and collective memory of people of African descent. Jacob Lawrence’s lithograph Two Rebels (1964)—his first work in any print medium—is one of his more direct responses to the social unrest of the civil rights era, depicting a limp figure being carried off by police officers. Kara Walker’s monumental print triptych Resurrection Story with Patrons (2017) emulates the three-panel format of traditional altarpieces. Walker engages with themes of martyrdom and the role of monuments in society in her images.

The final room of the exhibition explores a wide range of themes and motifs, from travel and landscape to spiritual traditions and cultural exchange. Highlights include Clementine Hunter’s undated painting Going to Church, a vivid depiction of rural Louisiana life that captures the joyful experience of church for the artist and her community with festive attire and blooming flowers, and Richard Mayhew’s Sacred Path (1998), which challenges traditional landscape painting through its extraordinary exploration of color inspired by the artist’s Native and African American ancestors’ connections to the land. Vivian Browne’s African sojourn in the early 1970s inspired her to explore landscapes and abstract compositions in vibrant color palettes. Her monochromatic drawing study Benin Equestrian (1971), based on a Benin wooden sculpture of a figure on horseback, demonstrates how she distilled patterns and forms from African art into marks and shapes she later applied to her abstract work. Howardena Pindell’s India: Lord Krishna (1986) belongs to a series of works that she began while she was recovering from a car accident in which she suffered a head injury and memory loss. Pulling from her extensive collection of postcards and mementos, Pindell created collages featuring the art and cultural sites she had encountered on extensive travels to Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and Europe. The segmented imagery references the multifaceted nature of her “being and experience.”

Exhibition Organization

The exhibition is organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Exhibition Curators

The exhibition is curated by Kanitra Fletcher, associate curator of African American and Afro-Diasporic art, and Shelley Langdale, curator and head of the department of modern and contemporary prints and drawings, both at the National Gallery of Art, Washington.