Dr. Glenn Toby

Dr. Glenn Toby built a career on reading value before the market does. In business he is an entrepreneur with an unusual instinct for where things are heading; in public life he is a philanthropist who has spent decades turning that instinct toward people the economy tends to overlook.

It began with an acquisition. Two artwork after Basquiat, from the 2001 edition published under the authority of the Estate, reached him from the estate of the artist’s father, placed by the dealer Jeff Jaffe. Most collectors would have hung them and stopped there. He built a case and started driving.

The logic is the same one behind The Book Bank Foundation, the 501(c)(3) he founded to fight illiteracy, hunger and homelessness across Atlanta and New York. He knows what it is to be a child for whom a book was the only available exit. Access is not a program he runs. It is the whole argument.

So the exhibition goes to a public arts center in southwest Atlanta before it goes to Miami Art Week. It shares walls with a hundred local artists in a four-floor building on Peachtree Street. It sets up in a hotel ballroom in Columbia, South Carolina, so that a city that had never seen a Basquiat in person could see two. Wherever it lands, a portion goes back into the community that hosted it.

Basquiat painted for the people who were not being counted. It would be a strange tribute to lock the result away from them.