Terry Scarborough (‘74) on Becoming an Art Collector

“When I look back on it and thinking about Wake Forest, I didn’t know it at the time, but I was dating a guy who was a year ahead of me. He knew a lot about art and was interested in it. We used to go to the student center, and I remember him showing me a Leonard Baskin piece that they had there and I never really, um, it didn’t click. I didn’t grow up with art. I didn’t study any art history. So years, years later I was living in Connecticut, and I went into a little art gallery, it was more like antique, one of these sort of flea market kind of vendors where they have stuff everywhere, and leaning against the wall buried in things… I’d always kind of liked art, but interested on the periphery of it, but there was this little Leonard Baskin. It just triggered this memory of the Leonard Baskin at Wake Forest. It was like $140 or something, and I thought, “I could own that.” It was very exciting!

So I bought it. So that was one of the first thing, I had bought local artists and things, so that was the first thing that was a named artist. So, I do credit it back to Wake Forest. I wasn’t collecting for investments, I wasn’t thinking at all about that. I was just buying pieces that I loved. I loved color, and I loved black and white pieces. I just thought things I liked and that got me and then I got addicted after that and couldn’t stop. That was really the beginning. There wasn’t a strategy, it was just moved along in a very happy way.” – Terry Scarborough (’74)