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Thornton Dial Sr. (1928-2016), made symbolic mixed-media paintings and sculptural assemblage works with profound titles. “The Last Day of Martin Luther King” (1992), references the civil rights leader’s assassination, a moment of national tragedy, sadness, and mourning, and an inflection point in American race relations. “High and Wide (Carrying the Rats to the Man)” (2002) depicts a slave ship in troubled waters. “The Old Water” (2004) raises issues of equal opportunity and government accountability. All three works by Dial, who was born, lived, worked and died in Alabama, are on view in “Souls Grown Deep: Artists of the African American South.” The exhibition features 24 works by African American artists from the southeastern United States, spanning generations, expressing themselves through variety of mediums.

The foundation that holds one of the largest collections of art by African American artists in the U.S. south will invest its assets in the communities where those artists lived and worked. The Souls Grown Deep Foundation is committing $1 million over three years – the bulk of its endowment – to support racial and social justice as well as jobs and community development in nine southern states. The impact investing strategy was developed in partnership with Upstart Co-Lab, a network of investors in “the creative economy,” as a way to share some of the growing value of Souls Grown Deep’s collection with the families and communities of the 160 artists who created the more than 1,000 works.

As arts institutions in the US and the UK come under increasing fire for their relationships with donors who have controversial business ties, one arts organization thinks activists might be missing the forest for the trees. “While there is a cry about comportment of individuals, it’s not as core to the institution as what the institution is doing with its own money,” says Maxwell Anderson, the president of Souls Grown Deep, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting the work of African American artists from the South.

In an art market that commands more than $150 million for an Amedeo Modigliani, or more than $90 million for a David Hockney—a living artist—how can even the most well-endowed museum compete?

Growing up, Essie Bendolph Pettway was used to seeing the vibrant quilts her mother, Mary Lee Bendolph, sewed with the other quilters of Gee’s Bend, Ala., hanging over the cracks in their house to keep the cold winds out in the winter. “They had to do what they could to keep us warm,” said Pettway, who learned how to quilt as a child from Bendolph. “That’s how we kept warm, by quilts.” Bendolph’s quilts now hang in art museums around the country, including in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The museum recently acquired 15 quilts by artists from Gee’s Bend and neighboring towns from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, an Atlanta-based organization focused on preserving the work of contemporary African American artists in the South.

Ever since the categories of art brut and outsider art were first established decades ago, the work of women artists in a wide range of media — Aloïse Corbaz, Jeanne Tripier, Madge Gill, Anna Zemánková, Judith Scott, and more recent discoveries, such as Henriette Zéphir and Kazumi Kamae, among them—have played a central role in the public’s understanding of these related phenomena. In the United States, in addition to Scott’s strange, yarn-wrapped, mixed-media sculptures, the work of such female outsiders as Lee Godie, Janet Sobel, and Sister Gertrude Morgan has become prized by collectors; in recent decades, in the Deep South, the Atlanta-based Souls Grown Deep Foundation has called attention to the creations of other self-taught women artists, especially those of African descent.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art presents Souls Grown Deep: Artists of the African American South, an exhibition including paintings, sculptures, and quilts that celebrates the recent acquisition of 24 works from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation. Among them are outstanding examples of large-scale sculptures and reliefs by Thornton Dial, assemblages by Lonnie Holley, Ronald Lockett, Hawkins Bolden, and Bessie Harvey, and an impressive selection of multi-colored quilts made by several generations of women from Gee’s Bend, Alabama, and the nearby towns of Rehoboth and Alberta. Many of these pieces were composed of found and salvaged materials and are deeply rooted in personal history of their makers.