149 Thomas G. B. Wheelock 1941–2016 ing Masks: Art and Culture in Burkina Faso, though the related exhibition is yet to be realized. Tom was deputy director of the Center for African Art when I joined the institution in 1987. In honor of his late mother, a Vassar alum, I curated a small exhibition from Tom’s collection at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, in 2000. Since that time, we both, most surprisingly, became Southerners— Tom in Nashville and me at the High Museum in Atlanta. Fed by a ceaseless desire to collect all of the art of Burkina Faso, his interest was not limited to masks and fi gurative sculpture but was all encompassing. The last time I saw the collection it was in high-end art storage in the Bronx and, sadly, it had been years since Tom had lived with the extraordinary works of art that he had devotedly assembled. However, this meant the collection was spared the Nashville fl ood that destroyed his massive archive and library. A magnifi cent small selection of works from the Wheelock Collection was offered at auction at Sotheby’s in Paris in 2011. The question now is what will become of Tom’s amazing legacy, an infi nitely signifi cant artistic treasure trove that represents the national heritage of Burkina Faso. As his friend Ollie describes, “Tom will always be remembered by his many friends as a modern Renaissance man: pensive, intelligent, curious, and as comfortable in tails in his opera box at the Met or bearded and in Tuareg gear in the Sahara. He was a capable angler, whether on the Ausable River or off the coast of Antigua, and he was a sneaky good golfer. He was gracious and welcoming, easily conversant in French, and also had a critical and appreciative eye for art far removed from that of his beloved Burkina. His last years were happily spent with his companion, Jannean, in Tennessee.” Carol Thompson Thomas G. B. Wheelock entered this world on October 21, 1941, and left it on December 23, 2016. He became a passionate collector of Burkina Faso art after arriving in Ouagadougou in the summer of 1972, following a rigorous trans-Saharan journey. He spent most of the next decade in that country. In a short home video posted on Vimeo four years ago by his adopted granddaughter, Emily Yorke, Tom—wearing an elegant scarf, hat, three-piece suit, tie, and pocket square, as always— speaks about this time, with eyes twinkling, as though it were just yesterday. In this short video Emily observes, “Everything he did was a little bit more interesting.” After African art, opera was perhaps Tom’s next greatest passion, his enthusiasm for which he shared with many, including his lifelong friends Seattle African art collectors Oliver and Pamela Cobb. Ollie recalls that he was “one of the last of the New York knickerbockers who was equally comfortable in the Sahara as well as in his box at the opera, which I had the pleasure of attending with him when I came into the city. You might say Tom was ‘peripatetic,’ with homes at different times in Antigua, Hudson, and eventually Nashville, as well as two or three different apartments in New York City. Perhaps his restlessness was one of the features that made him so attractive. There always seemed to be a new interest that Tom would pursue, but, of course, at the top of the summit was Burkina Faso art.” In a 2007 interview with Rebecca Bynum, Tom remembered the beginnings of his life as a collector. “I cannot say that collecting African art was something that occurred purely by chance. Collecting was already in my blood. It saw its beginnings sometime in the mid 1940s when, as a young boy, I was fatefully lured by the Metropolitan Museum’s decision to deaccession a myriad of minor dynastic objects from their storerooms. Entranced at the time by ancient Egypt, I bought a painted-wood-and-gesso cobra, the uraeus from a statue of an Egyptian pharaoh.” I fi rst saw the twinkle in Tom’s eye in the 1980s when I met him at the home of Professor Christopher D. Roy, a specialist in the art of Burkina Faso at the University of Iowa, where I was studying art history. The two were discussing, even back then, the idea of organizing a major exhibition of Burkina Faso art. The idea fi nally came to fruition in 2007 with Prestel’s publication of the landmark Land of the Fly-
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