Born and raised in Columbus, Georgia, William Arnett grew up in the American South during its era of racial segregation. In the early 1960s, shortly after graduating from the University of Georgia, he left the US for London, to work as the European representative of an American manufacturer. He traveled widely in Great Britain and the Continent, spending his personal time at major museums and other sites of historical, cultural, or religious significance. An irrepressible collector in childhood (butterflies, comic books, baseball cards, marbles, etc.), Arnett developed a similar fervor for the visual arts while living abroad. Eventually he quit his job and ventured further afield, traveling and collecting antiquities around the Mediterranean Basin—Greek and Roman at first, then relics from the ancient civilizations of the Middle East.

During the mid-1960s he was drawn more eastward, to India, to Southeast Asia, and to the art of China. From 1966 to 1970, Arnett made six extended trips to Asia to study and acquire art—sometimes accompanied by his brother and business partner, Robert—with repeated visits to Hong Kong and Singapore to purchase Chinese jade and porcelain. His interest in the totality of Chinese civilization, and his inclusive approach to aesthetics, meant he did not restrict his jade acquisitions to a single epoch or style. If anything, he was most interested in artistic continuities across time, from the Shang to the later dynasties.
As a devotee not only of art, but also the beliefs and traditions that inform it, Arnett sought to explore and understand the diversity, as well as the commonalities, of the world’s civilizations. He came to believe art occupies a central place in the self-conception of every culture. As he would later write, “Art, with its ability to unify and transform a population, could be as much a cause as an effect of a great civilization.”

By the early 1970s, Arnett had married his high-school sweetheart, Judy Mitchell, had four sons with her and settled in Atlanta, and was making his living buying and selling art from all over the world— even as he built a private collection of art from five continents. Through the 1970s his enthusiasms turned toward art from sub-Saharan Africa, Oceania, and the pre-Columbian Americas. He prioritized educating his fellow Southerners about non-western art. He regularly loaned to museums and lectured; he also produced several exhibition catalogs and organized shows of African and Southeast Asian art for museums in the Southern United States. (His African art collection was later acquired by Emory University’s Michael C. Carlos Museum.) Beginning in September 1973, his Chinese jade collection—some 250 pieces—spent several years on loan to Atlanta’s High Museum of Art.

When a health condition curtailed his travel in the 1980s (he had been to more than sixty countries in his collecting life), Arnett began to look closely at art forms in his native region. Soon, primarily through word of mouth, he was encountering African American artists throughout the Southern states who shared themes, styles, and media—and all had thrived with limited artistic and formal education. Struck by the range and quality of such art-making within Southern African-American culture, Arnett gradually concluded that racial prejudices in the American South existed in ignorance of a flourishing visual-art tradition among its African American population; and that ignorance perpetuated itself, in part, by enforcing social conditions that regulated or eliminated cultural space in which to experience and appreciate powerful African American art.

Arnett spent the ensuing three decades supporting and promoting this emerging field of art. For the first time, he found himself involved with living artists, in environments where art and cultural politics were inseparable. Despite the obstacles he encountered, he always maintained that the African American creative expression he championed—much like the art of other civilizations he had collected throughout his adult life—would live on to represent its makers, its culture, and its times. As he put it in a New Yorker profile from 2013, “Metaphorically speaking, I am betting on art.”

To play his part, Arnett found it necessary to assume roles far beyond those of collector or dealer: as patron, archivist, documentary photographer, writer, publisher, and ultimately, philanthropist. With Jane Fonda, he founded a publishing company to produce books and catalogs about this genre, most notably Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art of the South (two volumes) and a series of publications on the now renowned patchwork quilts of Gee’s Bend, Alabama. He also started the Souls Grown Deep Foundation and endowed it with more than 1,200 works by self-taught African American artists. Among its activities, the Foundation advocates for the art, and places works in the permanent collections of leading museums, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the de Young Museum; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and others. The Los Angeles Times has compared Arnett to John Lomax, the pioneering chronicler of American folk music, while the New York Times has likened his philanthropic vision to that of Samuel Kress and the Kress Foundation.