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On May 25, 1926, the New York Public Library announced that it had acquired the celebrated Afro-Latino bibliophile Arturo Schomburg’s collection of more than 4,000 books, manuscripts and other artifacts.

Schomburg was the most famous of the Black bibliophiles who, starting in the late 19th century, had amassed impressive “parlor libraries” in their homes.

Schomburg summed up his credo in a famous 1925 essay, writing, “The American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future.”

It is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the American Craft Museum in New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; and other institutions.

Thomas has long credited his contextual and historical inclinations to the influence of his mother, Deborah Willis, an artist, writer and former curator at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, in Harlem, N.Y., where, as a child, Thomas would join her after school.