When Robert Steele was a student attending Morehouse College in Atlanta, he got a job at the library of Atlanta University and would often visit the art gallery in its basement.

“I didn’t know who any of these artists were, but I found it so intriguing and it made such an impression,” he said.

Steele would later find out that the works he was enjoying were prize-winning entries from a national competition for African American artists, organized because “there was no place where African American artists could work,” he said. “Every year, they would choose 12 pieces, by people who at that time were unknown to the major art world — Romare Bearden, Faith Ringgold, David Driskell. … So what I had been looking at for two years were the best artists.”

Now, decades later, with a lifetime of supporting African American artists as a collector with his wife, Jean, Steele’s passion for African American art is benefiting Hawaii in a big way. In a gift-sale arrangement, 55 pieces from his vast collection of prints have been added to the Honolulu Museum of Art’s collection, increasing the number of African American artworks in the museum’s collection to 88. The works will go on display in phases in January in the exhibition “Forward Together: African American Prints From the Jean and Robert Steele Collection.” In January, Steele also joined the museum’s board of trustees, becoming the first African American on the board.

A retired psychology professor and dean of social sciences at the University of Maryland, Steele, 80, has no formal training in art, but has become an expert through persistence and passion. Name a significant African American artist whose works are out in print — Robert Blackburn, a master printmaker; Jacob Lawrence, known for portraying historical African Americans, such as Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass; or Margo Humphrey, the first Black woman to earn a graduate degree in art from Stanford University — and chances are not only does he have several of their works, he knows them personally.

“Most of these artists we got to know over the years,” he said.

Steele also served for 10 years as director of UMD’s David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora, named in honor of the artist and scholar who is considered the leading figure in the study of African American art. Driskell had chaired the university’s art department and hired a number of leading African American artists. “If you wanted to get a Ph.D. in African American art, you went to Maryland,” Steele said.

When Steele took on the position with Driskell Center, the fledgling institution was struggling and existed “only on paper,” said Jean Steele, who worked in the corporate world before retiring in the mid-2010s. “When Bob was there, we started asking people to donate art for the center. They filled a vault for the art. … They renovated one of the buildings to create a place for the center.”

The couple developed their interest in art together, spending many weekends going to art exhibitions.

“We thought grown-ups are supposed to go to concerts and museums and operas, and that’s how we got interested in visual arts,” said Steele, 79. “Neither one of us had taken an art course of any kind — not history, not drawing, nothing.”

They developed a fun but challenging way to refine their own taste in art. “Whenever we went to an art museum to look at art, before we could leave we had to tell each other our favorite three works and why,” she said.

Now a brief visit to the Steeles’ Hawaii Kai residence reveals works by a veritable who’s who of African American artists, with a story behind each one. The first piece they purchased, “Three African Women in Profile,” was by an artist, Tony Northern, who was “poorer than us,” Jean Steele said. “So he used pastels on the side of a cardboard box, so that corrugation you’re seeing is from the texture of that surface.”

The couple has close ties to Hawaii. Jean Steele’s family roots in Hawaii go back to the mid-1800s, and until a few years ago their daughter, Elisabeth Steele Hutchison, taught at the William S. Richardson School of Law. During visits they liked to visit the Honolulu Museum of Art to look at its collection of Japanese prints. “We always said if we started over, we’d start with Japanese prints,” said Robert Steele, who grew up in Alabama. “We have a small collection.”

Having started to give some of their collection to museums and galleries, “We are in the process now of, technically, of finding homes for our collection,” he said. “HoMA recently expressed interest in our collection, and the idea for us was to have some of our favorite pieces nearby.”

Much of their collection remains in storage in Maryland. About 98% of them are prints, obtained at a time when printmaking was becoming a popular medium for African American artists. “The major artists were becoming aware that if they went into printmaking, they could expand the audience of people who might be able to afford their work,” Jean Steele said. “So we came along at the right time.”

As a board member of the museum, Robert Steele hopes to help the organization increase its African American collection even further if it wants to, and wants to connect with local African American artists here in Hawaii.

“I would very much like to reach out to them,” he said. “I have discovered that some of them have collections themselves, and I would love to know what’s in their collection.”

He is accustomed to his pioneering position with art museums. He was the first African American on Yale University’s art gallery board — he also donated 100 prints to the gallery — and during his tenure has seen its board increase its minority representation to six from one.

“There’s been a lot of things in my professional life where I’ve been the only (African American),” he said, “but the trick about being the only one is not remaining the only one.”