Reba & Dave Williams

NEW YORK—Before they shared a passion for art, Reba and Dave Williams had twin business careers. Reba served as a securities analyst at Mitchell Hutchins, and later as director of special projects at Alliance Capital Management, while Dave was chairman at Alliance Capital Management. He also served as director of research and executive vice president at Mitchell Hutchins.

The couple began collecting prints in 1975. Today, not only do they have the largest and broadest private collection of American prints in the world, but they also have a wide-reaching art education to go with it.

Both went back to school for courses in art history at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center (Reba earned a Ph.D at Hunter), and they completed special classes on prints at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The New York-based couple also created the Stamford, Conn. Print Research Foundation, which houses and arranges traveling exhibitions for the bulk of their 5,000-plus-piece collection. Their holdings focus on prints from 1900 to 1960. Selections from the collection—which ranges from Winslow Homer to Andy Warhol—have been displayed everywhere from Mexico to Japan.

Dave Williams chatted with ArtInfo about the collection.

How We Caught the Bug:

Since we were both working on Wall Street, Reba said we were becoming very narrow in our interests and we needed an activity that would take us to a completely different place. We both already had very small collections of pictures—some prints—and we decided that print collecting, since we had already started, would be our primary activity outside work.

Our First Acquisition:

The first prints we bought as a married couple were ten colored silkscreens from Warhol’s Flowers Portfolio. We brought them partly because they would hang well in our loft; it had big walls and the portfolio suited us perfectly. They’re probably worth between $25,000 and $80,000 today.

Our Collecting Synergy:

We nearly always agree [on acquisitions], but that’s partly because Reba has a much better eye for color than I do. My interest is primarily black-and-white prints from the first half of the 20th century. We have our own special interests, and that minimizes disagreements.

Our Most Recent Acquisition:

We recently donated nearly all of our works by African-American artists of the 1930s and ’40s to the Met. It was 200-and-something prints. We had circulated the collection as an exhibition for a number of years. Now we have been gradually replacing works by those artists in our own collection. They include Raymond Steth, Charles Wilbert White, and John Wilson.

Our Favorite Acquisition:

It’s like children: you can’t choose.

Advice to Beginning Collectors:

Go to a recognized dealer and explain as best you can what you think your interests are.