Howard Foote's Donations to the Brooks Museum

This exhibit led me a merry chase, because I didn't want to have to ask where it was. It was in "Gallery 5B" I knew, but I had no earthly idea where that was. After some wandering through the museum I found it.

Howard Foote, a native Memphian, has been donating works of art to the Brooks for years. This exhibit highlights that generosity.

from the website (I've been unable to figure out how to link to a particular exhibit):

A Decade of Gifts from Howard Foote

Curated by Marina Pacini, Chief Curator and Curator of American, Modern, and Contemporary Art

Between 2002 and 2012, Howard Foote generously donated thirty-three paintings, watercolors, drawings, and a photograph to the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art. The artworks span almost a full century and in style range from abstraction to realism. Although the artists represented in the gift are primarily American-born—among them Sidney Goodman, Grace Hartigan, Everett Shinn, and Lois Dodd—his collecting also includes immigrants such as Alfred Eisenstadt, George Grosz, Raphael Soyer, and Elizabeth O’Reilly. His catholic taste provides a compelling overview of twentieth-century art through a group of artists whose works reflect the great diversity of modernism.
...

My favorite is a large picture called What Sunflowers Do (2007), by Patricia Forrester (1940-2011). The Brooks has a short video:



My favorite is at about 25 seconds in.

Some other of Forrester's work can be seen here.

Go Memphis has an article that closes with this:

In the way that all collections do, this selection from works of art donated to the Brooks by Foote indicates something about the mind of the person who over the years purchased them for his own pleasure, lived with them, and then decided to pass them along for the pleasure of people who live in the city where he was born and worked. That mind seems to be curious, restless, esthetically various and — for our benefit — generous.