. >> reporter: meet bill arnett, a curator with a cause. >> if he had been, oh, let's just say whiteg in new york, he would have been a celebrity long ago in my opinion. and he will be anyway, but sometimes it takes longer. >> the art i'm involved with is art that compared favorably with any art that has been produced anywhere on earth in the past 100 years, and i wouldn't be involved otherwise. i'm interested in the great art of the world, and i have spent my life exploring it. >> reporter: arnett lived and works overseas for years where he became one of the world's greatest experts, and cure rated exhibitions for museums around the united states. >> i came to realize that here we had something that was equal to all of that. i realized that there was something here that i didn't know about, and neither did anybody else. >> reporter: in the 1970s, arnett began to travel the back roads of the deep south and discovered art nobody knew about. >> i discovered here in the south we had this black culture which had been making art since probably the first slaves got off of the boat, and bla