Young visitors interacting with the Ollie Family Resource Cart during SLAM's 2024 Lunar New Year Celebration.
With hopes of inspiring imagination and exploration, St. Louis natives Joyce Wilks-Love and Reginald Ollie donated the Ollie Family Resource Cart to the Saint Louis Art Museum in 2020. The year 2025 marks five years since this resource for local youth and families made its SLAM debut.
The gift is a resource dedicated to providing books for elementary and middle school age Museum visitors and their families. Around 100 books are on the cart at any given time, and highlight abstraction, stories about Black and female artists, poetry, and other stories that celebrate imagination and creativity. Books are continually added to the Cart, including My Day with the Panye by Tami Charles that relates to the exhibition Manuel Mathieu: Pendulum, which is currently on view in Gallery 301.

Visitors interact with the Ollie Family Resource Cart
Many books on the Ollie Family Resource Cart relate to artworks in the Museum’s collection, and specifically, those in the Thelma and Bert Ollie Memorial Collection, which Joyce Wilks-Love and Reginald Ollie’s brother and sister-in-law—Ronald M. Ollie and Monique McRipley Ollie—donated to SLAM in 2017. The Ollie Collection includes 81 paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, and sculptures by prominent African American artists. This generous gift was celebrated by the Museum with an exhibition and related catalogue, as well as a wide range of programs. Reginald Ollie and Joyce Wilks-Love donated the Ollie Family Resource Cart in 2020 in honor of their brother, Ronald M. Ollie.
A testament to education and access, the Ollie Family Resource Cart promotes creativity, learning, and imagination. The bright-blue cart can often be seen during Wee Weekend, Family Sunday, Baby and Me, and Toddler and Me programs as well as in the galleries at other times. The lower section of the cart includes tactile objects, encouraging young visitors to engage in different styles of learning and to activate a variety of senses.