Coda: Reilly Nail’s Last Chapter
Reilly Nail, co-founder of the Old Jail Art Center and its founding director, collected art from childhood. Over the course of his lifetime, his discerning eye helped shape an eclectic collection that gave him much pleasure as he covered every wall in his house top to bottom and each surface with things he liked. Along with his mother, Wyldon Nail Burgess, and cousins Bill and Jewel Nail Bomar, he contributed works that would become the cornerstone of the museum’s permanent collection. After that initial donation of art in 1980, Reilly continued to give the museum pieces from his collection from time to time. In December 2005, he gave the museum the bulk of his collection. At his death in 2006, the museum discovered that he left the museum first choice of what remained in his collection. This exhibition is drawn from his last major gift and the bequest.
OJAC Trustee Jill Matthews Wilkinson and Trustee Advisor Sally Blanton Porter have co-curated the exhibition. Both women knew Reilly well and had watched his collection grow over the decades. After making the selection jointly, Jill Wilkinson wrote the essay for the gallery guide, concluding, “I am very grateful to Reilly for the opportunity to look so carefully at these works and to try to shape a response to them that opens a window into his collecting and the Old Jail’s Collection. I think the exhibition of his last gift allows us to see what a complicated and gifted man he was and what a treasure he has given the world here in Albany.”