SALEM — The final exhibition to fill the main gallery at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art this year is a delightfully eclectic collection of postwar African American art that is every bit as interesting as the story of how it came together is inspiring.

Memories & Inspiration: The Kerry and C. Betty Davis Collection of African American Art is on display in the Melvin Henderson-Rubio Gallery and in the lobby through Dec. 20, accompanied by a softcover catalog published by International Arts and Artists, the Washington, D.C., group that coordinated the show. Salem is the final stop on a tour that that has taken the collection of more than 60 works around the United States since January 2020 (the start of the pandemic) — a trip with 16 exhibitions in a dozen states.

The exhibition had the most humble of beginnings — it started in the early 1980s when Kerry Davis, then a young postal carrier in Atlanta, decided he wanted some art in his home.

“I came to this with no forethought or anything,” he told me this fall when he and Betty visited Salem for the show’s opening in September. “I’m here because I wanted to hang something on the wall. But as I continued, there’s an evolution. I started to read the paintings, to see them, and you can’t help but learn.”

The collection includes work by well-known African American artists such as Romare Bearden, Elizabeth Catlett, Sam Gilliam, Jacob Lawrence, Samella Lewis, and Charles White. It also includes work by emerging artists, born in the 1980s and 1990s, who are now working artists in the Atlanta area, where the Davises live.

In an essay in the show’s catalog, Amalia Amaki — an art historian, artist, and film critic who has written widely on African American art — writes in great detail about many of the individual pieces. The point of the exhibition, she writes, “was a crusade, conscious or subconscious, launched by the collectors to affirm the African American experience. The communal act of sublimation and celebration began covertly, with the quiet process of acquiring — then placing on view — timeless works of art that continue to speak to African Americans’ humanity, dignity, and purpose.”

The acquisition aspect began in 1980 when Davis was hired by the U.S. Postal Service after serving in the Air Force. His delivery route in Atlanta exposed him to artwork in people’s homes and businesses. “I noticed how they embraced their relationship with each work and found the notion of preserving these cultural images to be inspirational,” he writes in the catalog. “Something I began to do, when buying artwork myself.”

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The communal aspect of it quickly followed: Davis talked with people who had purchased art, but he also got to know the artists themselves — working people for whom he has tremendous admiration and respect and is also a tireless advocate. The labels for some pieces, like a 1987 woodcut titled Mickey, drop little gems about his friendships with the artists. “We hit it off quickly,” he says of Michael Ellison, the artist who carved Mickey and died in 2001. “In no time, he could count on my help whenever he needed it, from repairing brakes on a car to helping him put a bike together for his nephew.”

That’s part of the show’s power, the connection the couple have with the artists. For the opening reception, they were accompanied by one of them, Freddie Styles, an Atlanta artist who has two stunning pieces in the show — an oil painting and another in acrylic, created not with a brush, but with azalea roots or pine needles. Styles told me his home had recently burned, and that his first call was to Kerry, who helped get him set up in new digs.

Next to one of Styles’ pieces, titled simply Kerry’s Painting, is one of the show’s largest pieces, a vertical oil on canvas titled Heliocentric done by Mildred Thompson in 1994. “When Mildred passed in 2003, helping her partner, who was the executor of her estate, move items from a storage facility to their home was like therapy for me,” Davis writes in the label for the piece. “There were numerous trips back and forth. It took almost a year. When the work was completed, she gave me this painting.”

Work by more than 60 artists appears in the show, ranging from portraiture and collage to abstract and landscape. About a third of the artists were born in the 1930s and 1940s; some pieces were done by artists born in the early 1990s.

One piece, Fall Landscape, is an undated oil painting by John Wesley Hardrick. He was born in 1891 and his artistic work received positive notices when he was just a teenager growing up in Indianapolis. He went on to become a Works Progress Administration muralist and exhibited work in the 1940 American Negro Exposition: Celebrating 75 Years of Negro Achievement in Chicago.

About two-thirds of the show’s pieces were made during the 1980s and later, with a few from just a couple of years ago. The rest was produced in the 1930s through the 1970s. More than three decades of collecting art — and getting to know the artists who made it — amounted to a unique and very personalized arts education.

However casually they may have started, collections like these are bound up with a kind of social activism that dates back to the slave era, critics have noted, with collectors deliberately seeking out and acquiring art by African American artists.

Writing in the catalog, Amaki comments on this: “By targeting environments where African American art has rarely, if ever, been displayed, the collectors participate in the ongoing advancement of what activist and sociologist W.E.B. DuBois called ‘the visual vocabulary that defines collective memory and historical identity for African Americans.’”

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I asked Davis what advice he would have for a person today who appreciated art and wanted to support artists but is not able to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on an artwork.

“You have to be true to yourself and know what you can afford and what you can’t afford,” he said. “I would engage the artists. They need money every 30 days to pay that light, just like you do, and they have knees pop out and their kids need glasses. Relationships far out-value any dollar.

“I would just be honest, don’t try to trick ‘em or slick ‘em, but I would just be honest and tell them where you are. They can appreciate that. Say what you mean and mean what you say. If you say $50 every two weeks, give them $50 every two weeks. They’ll appreciate that.”