Doug Houchens’ 1969 sabbatical opened the door for Herb Jackson, Davidson Class of 1967. Jackson’s talents were quickly recognized, and he moved from temporary faculty to Associate Professor of Art in 1971.

The first exhibitions organized by Jackson were displayed in the Stowe Gallery of the Cunningham Fine Arts building. In 1977, the gallery moved to the lobby of Chambers Building. The new Chambers Gallery in Davidson’s main academic building put the visual arts in the center of campus life and resulted not only in greater gallery square footage, but also storage facilities for the Permanent Art Collection. The move was a significant upgrade from the Cunningham coat closet, where the collection was previously stored.

In 1972 Jackson premiered the first of five Davidson National Print and Drawing Competitions. Jackson describes two motivations for taking on such an ambitious project: …to let the nation know that we were serious about art now that we had an art major and … to try to build on this little core collection of a few pieces that we had when I first got here to the point where we could actually justify saying we had a collection – for years I didn’t use those terms – we just had some pieces.
 
As an artist, Jackson had already figured prominently in numerous national art competitions. Based on those experiences he believed that the Davidson National should do all the things right that he had observed as deficient in other shows. He wanted it to be “the supreme show and set the standard for all the others.”  In short, it did. Jackson sent 10,000 mailings and 2,000 posters to every state and placed ads in the top national art periodicals. His efforts resulted in the largest response in the history of national art competitions, with 2,523 submissions from forty-nine states. Jackson recalls: “They came in crates at the rate of one hundred fifty a day by every possible carrier, and each was carefully unpacked and stacked in huge towers to await the judging.” The competition’s entry fee of five dollars per artist generated revenue for numerous purchase awards. Between 1972 and 1976 the competition added more than fifty works to the Permanent Art Collection. At the time he oversaw these national competitions Jackson was teaching a full course load and had no departmental assistant. He did, however, have his spouse, Laura Grosch who is an accomplished artist and woman who spent countless hours along side Jackson helping to receive submissions, cooking for the visiting jurors and numerous other undertakings. Even with Laura’s tireless help, his labor of love consumed more than 1,200 hours of his time each year.

The juror for the 1973 Davidson National was Clement Greenberg, who is considered one of the most influential American art critics of the twentieth century. The jurors for the 1972, 1974, 1975, and 1976 competitions were also impressive artists and critics: Frank Getlein, Walter Darby Bannard, Judith Goldman, and Marcia Tucker. With the exception of Mr. Getlein and Ms. Goldman, the judges acknowledged a certain naïveté about prints and drawings. Their fresh eyes resulted in innovative exhibitions where the work had to stand on its own merit, without the established reputation of the artist.

In the 1970s Jackson’s career as an artist began to flourish, and as a result of his own exhibitions, he met collectors and dealers interested in donating works to Davidson College. One of Davidson’s greatest benefactors was The Martin Ackerman Foundation, which regularly acquired art from commercial galleries or dealers in financial straits and then gifted those works to non-profit institutions. Among the most important works donated to the Permanent Art Collection were works by Josef Albers, Robert Motherwell, Larry Rivers, Beverly Pepper, Dieter Roth, Berenice Abbott, and Todd Webb. Lakeside Studio in Michigan was another significant donor, gifting over two hundred and fifty works to Davidson between 1970 and 1980. Jackson’s career as a painter and his resulting influence among important collectors demonstrated the wisdom of Philip Moose’s advice to President Cunningham two decades earlier.

Jackson also developed the Permanent Art Collection the old-fashioned way. Like Houchens, he was careful to save a little money from his budget each year to purchase work for the collection from various sources. Sotheby’s auction house was a favorite. Jackson recalls that a funny thing often happened on his way through the auction at Sotheby’s. Specific works he desired usually became to expensive for his limited budget once the bidding began, but “…then something else would come up and nobody was particularly interested in it for some reason, and I would grab it. The prices on some of those things were incredibly low.” For example, it was Jackson’s keen eye at Sotheby’s that netted an etching by Rembrandt for under $150.

 Of all his extraordinary accomplishments, Jackson considers the close relationship he developed with Charlotte native and Harlem Renaissance artist, Romare Bearden to be one of the highlights of his twenty-year tenure as gallery director. Jackson was introduced to Bearden’s work in 1971 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. After realizing the local connection Bearden had with the Charlotte area, Jackson proposed that Davidson award him with an honorary degree and organize an exhibition of his work. Jackson was the first in the region to recognize and celebrate the talents of this local native. Jackson and Bearden were not just professional acquaintances, but considered each other dear friends, "Over the years, I got to know Bearden. I would see him when I went to New York. He would visit me when he came to Charlotte. I loved the man very much. He was warm, generous and embracing. He was also verbally eloquent, quite the poet. It was easy to be mesmerized by his voice, his stories.”

 To inaugurate the opening of the new Katherine and Tom Belk Visual Art Center in 1993, Jackson organized a retrospective of another North Carolina native, Kenneth Noland. Herb Jackson and Davidson College celebrated the achievements of Noland with an honorary degree  and hosted the first retrospective of his work in North Carolina. To commemorate the event, Noland donated a large painting to Davidson that now hangs in the atrium of the Katherine and Tom Belk Visual Arts Center.

 By 1999 Herb Jackson had collected over 2,600 works of art and with a new Visual Arts Center, Davidson could now mount exhibitions in a place central to the entire community. With two pristine galleries, museum quality storage facilities, and funding for a full-time gallery director, Herb Jackson and Davidson College had built the machine, but needed someone to drive it forward. Enter, Brad Thomas.