The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced Monday that it had received a major gift of 20th-century works by African-American artists from the South, including 10 pieces by Thornton Dial and 20 important quilts made by the Gee’s Bend quilters of Alabama.
The works, 57 in all, are being donated by the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, which was begun in 2010 by the scholar and collector William S. Arnett to raise the profile of art by self-taught African-Americans. Thomas P. Campbell, the Met’s director, described the gift, which also includes work by Lonnie Holley, Nellie Mae Rowe and Joe Minter, as a significant enlargement of the museum’s holdings of work by black American artists.
