We honor the memory of David T. Owsley, who passed away on August 23, 2025, at the age of 96. A distinguished art collector, curator, and philanthropist, David served on the DMA’s Committee on Collections for a remarkable 32 years—he joined the committee in 1993 and was named an honorary member in 1998. He brought with him substantial curatorial experience, including a decade at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, as well as work at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
David was the son of Alvin and Lucy Ball Owsley and the grandson of Frank C. Ball, one of the five Ball brothers who moved their glass container business to Muncie, Indiana, and donated to the college that became Ball State University in 1918. With his expertise and wide-ranging taste as a collector, David was a thoughtful benefactor of the DMA. He began gifting work to the Museum in 1989 and played an essential role in shaping the Museum’s Asian art collection.
The DMA’s Asian art collection changed dramatically after the 1993 exhibition East Meets West: Selections from the David T. Owsley Collection when David agreed to donate the exhibited works to the Museum, thus providing the core of the new Asian galleries that opened in 1996. David’s generosity and connoisseurship continued to be important to the growth of the Museum’s collection. In 2000, his vision was recognized when several longtime DMA supporters—including Margaret McDermott, Nancy Hamon, the Cecil and Ida Green Acquisition Fund, the Cecil and Ida Green Foundation, and an anonymous donor—joined together to acquire one of the Museum’s major works of the permanent collection, a Chola dynasty sculpture of Shiva Nataraja, in his honor. In 2003, during the Museum’s centennial year, David pledged to gift his personal collection of South Asian art to the DMA through his estate. Many of these promised gifts continue to be featured at the Museum today. In 2013, the Museum celebrated the publication of the first catalogue dedicated to exploring the Museum’s collection of South, Southeast Asian, and Himalayan art—The Arts of India, Southeast Asia, and the Himalayas at the Dallas Museum of Art. For over 35 years, David gifted nearly 60 works of art from his collection as well as supported the acquisition of more than 120 important works for the Museum, largely through an acquisition fund he created to help build the Museum’s collection of Asian art. His impact spans multiple collection areas, including African art, Asian art, design and decorative art, European art, Indigenous Art of the Americas, Island Southeast Asia and Oceanic art, prints and drawings, and U.S. and Canadian art. His most recently supported acquisitions are a pair of Edo period Japanese screens and an 18th-century Iranian helmet (kulah khud), the first Safavid period work to enter the Museum’s collection. With the growth of the Asian communities in North Texas and rising interest in Buddhism and Hinduism in the United States, his gifts have become among the most popular works in the DMA’s collection.
“David’s life was marked by a profound love of the arts. We are deeply grateful for his dedication, passion, and expertise and for his many gifts that have enriched the DMA and will continue to inspire generations to come,” said Interim Director Tamara Wootton Forsyth. “We will remember him fondly with great admiration and gratitude.”