Not all of Donna’s collecting has been about seeking something out. Some of the most meaningful pieces in her collection arrived through proximity — through years of living and working in Dahlonega, of knowing the people who made things there, of watching students discover for the first time what it felt like to make something true. Brad Walker has been throwing pots on the square since the early 1970s, writing lines from Whitman and Rumi into the clay as if the vessel itself needed to carry words. Jeffree Lerner came to the North Georgia mountains and found in them the spiritual landscape his work had always been reaching toward. Tommye McClure Scanlin spent nearly three decades building UNG’s art program from the ground up, weaving tapestries in the evenings that caught the light of the same Appalachian ridgelines her students painted in the mornings.

And then there were the students themselves — the ones whose work caught Donna’s eye not because it was finished, but because something in it was unmistakably alive. A professor who keeps a student’s painting is making a quiet declaration: I believe this person has something to say. The pieces in this collection are that declaration, held in paint and paper and fiber, year after year.