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Living Color Tom Styron, director of the Greenville County Museum of Art, sees the bigger picture
and just want what’s best for the museum, so don’t waste your art history on me.’” Pellet’s authenticity, directness, and goodwill struck a nerve with Styron. “I thought how bad can it be down there if this guy is running it?” Over the past 30 years, authenticity, directness, and goodwill have combined to turn the Greenville County Museum of Art into the premier American art museum in the South. Under the directorship of Styron and the generous support of the community, the museum has amassed the largest private collection of Andrew Wyeth’s watercolors in the world as well as collections of Southern and American contemporary art. “The potential that I thought I saw has transformed into much more than I ever imagined,” says Styron, who plans on continuing to build the museum’s collection despite the constant changes in the art market, including rising prices and decreasing availability. “There is something about a great art collection that is always stimulating,” says Styron, “and characterizes its community as open minded, critical, curious, and progressive. I think this institution can symbolize that.” Eye Spy: Under the leadership of Tom Styron, the Greenville County Museum of Art now ranks among the premier art museums in the South, with the world’s largest private collection of Andrew Wyeth watercolors, as well as a formidable stock of Southern and American contemporary art.
Photograph by Paul Mehaffey
/ by Steven Tingle
om Styron, the longtime director of the Greenville County Museum of Art, will be the first to admit he had no intention of ever coming to Greenville. In the early 1980s, he was the ambitious, young director of the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, Virginia, pleased with his position but on the lookout for new opportunities. At the same time, the Greenville Museum was sifting through the ashes of a very controversial period (the details are not important) that had left it without a director and with a fair amount of bad blood. The museum commission was searching for a new director but many of those qualified for the position, including Styron, felt the situation was just too toxic. “The museum was in quite a bit of a stew and had lost a good amount of its support and goodwill,” says Styron. “I had been contacted about it, but it was not a situation that interested me.” Then the current chair of the Greenville Museum’s commission John Pellet and his wife visited the Chrysler Museum in person with hopes to convince Styron to at least visit Greenville and take a look at the situation. “John was wearing three different kinds of plaid,” says Styron. “And as I was taking them through the museum, I gestured toward a big abstract expressionist painting when John said, ‘Tom, you don’t need to tell me anything about this collection; I don’t know anything about art. I’m chairman of the commission because the major donor in Greenville thought he could trust me to run it. I’m a businessman
42 TOWN / towncarolina.com
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8/16/13 10:58 AM