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A Fine Collection
The Williamses: a place in the art world.
Dave Williams (MBA '61) and his wife, Reba White Williams (MBA '70), were Wall Street executives when they married in 1975. To ensure that their friends would not all be drawn from their work environment — which Reba Williams feared might turn the couple into the narrowest people alive — the Williamses sought to widen their social circle, according to an article in the New York Times (March 17, 2002). They gravitated toward the art world and began collecting prints, eventually amassing some six thousand works, mostly by American artists.
Last summer, in downtown Stamford, Connecticut, the Williamses bought a classic building (constructed in 1894, in a Neo-Italian Renaissance style) to house their collection. They do not intend to make it a museum, but instead will restrict access to scholars, researchers, art historians, and museum curators. We're just not prepared to create a public space with a full-time staff, explained Mrs. Williams, who earned a Ph.D. in art history in 1996. We'd like to be compared to the New York Public Library's Print Room, where scholars from everywhere can come to work.
Their collection, particularly noted for its Depression-era pieces, also includes prints by artists such as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, and Andy Warhol; it is said by experts to be among the finest private collections of American prints in the world. As one museum curator noted, Most museums don't have a collection that can rival it because most museums cannot spend the time and drive it takes to put it together. Although the Stamford site will be closed to the general public, the prints can be viewed in traveling exhibits, thanks to a nonprofit organization the Williamses established in 1989 for that purpose.