Greenville County Museum of Art

Dec 3, 2025 — Continuing

Born in North Carolina to sharecroppers, Thomas Sills (1914 – 2000) steered an unconventional course to achieve success as an artist in New York. When he was only 11, he traveled by train from Raleigh to Harlem, where he stayed with an older brother. He worked odd jobs, including liquor deliveryman, and it was in a Greenwich Village liquor store that Sills met mosaic artist, Jeanne Reynal, who introduced Sills to her circle of friends and colleagues, including the artists Elaine and Willem de Kooning, David Hare, Mark Rothko, and critic Harold Rosenberg. Reynal, who later married Sills, collected works by Max Ernst, the de Koonings, and Marcel Duchamp, among others. As Sills remarked, “With paintings and artists all around me, it didn’t take very long before I got stirred up to doing my own work. I wanted to go my own way from the very beginning.”