An Inner Vision: Selections from the Hyde Collection

Over the last four decades, the Memphis philanthropists Pitt and Barbara Hyde have cultivated an art collection rooted in their passion for art and its power to move viewers. This selection of works on view highlights the Hyde Collection’s history—from its initial focus on early American modernists like Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, and Georgia O’Keeffe, through the Hydes’ embrace of Abstract Expressionists including Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, and Joan Mitchell, and beyond.

The Hydes’ approach to collecting works of art is driven by the same curiosity, ingenuity, and tenacity evident in the family’s professional and philanthropic endeavors—an inner vision that has guided their dynamic collection into the present. In the 2000s, the collection expanded to represent a greater number of contemporary and international artists working in abstraction, including recent acquisitions are works by Olga de Amaral, Cecily Brown, and Pacita Abad. Some of the collection’s largest-scale works, by El Anatsui and Rashid Johnson, can be seen in the exhibition How to Carry Water.

An Inner Vision: Selections from the Hyde Collection is curated by Patricia Lee Daigle, Ph.D., Chief Curator, and Adeze Wilford, Blackmon Perry Curator of African American Art and Art of the African Diaspora, with support from Mallory Sharp, Ph.D., Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History, University of Mississippi.

All exhibitions at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art are underwritten by the MBMA Exhibition Fund: Lead support provided by Kay Clark, and Maggie and Milton Lovell, with additional funding from Anonymous, Irene and Ron Ayotte, Gloria and Kenneth Boyland, Deborah and Bob Craddock, Susan and James Edelman, Debi and Galen Havner, Sally Hergenrader, James R. Humphreys, Betty and George Johnson, Kristen and Jay Keegan, Valerie and Carl Person, Deborah D. Tipton, Bill Townsend, and the Doris S. and Hubert Kiersky Charitable Remainder Trust.