Sallie Casey Thayer

Sallie Casey Thayer, née Casey (February 14, 1856 – September 10, 1925) was a Kansas City art collector and advocate. Her diverse collection of fine and decorative art became the founding gift of the Spencer Museum of Art.

Early life Thayer was born in Covington, Kentucky and was a great-grandniece of US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall. After attending women's college in the 1870s, she married in 1880, merging her considerable social capital with that of prominent Kansas City merchant William Bridges Thayer (1852–1907). He would shortly become a partner in the Emery, Bird, Thayer Dry Goods Company. By 1914, the collection had grown to fill her home, and Thayer began actively advocating for the establishment of a permanent public art institution in the city—a dream she would ultimately abandon.

From 1914 to 1917, Thayer vocally criticized Kansas City's cultural environment, arguing that "although the city had come of age financially in the late 1800s, it had not addressed its need for libraries, educational facilities, and, most of all, museums." She called the new Union Station "hideously ugly", and she once decried the lack of women on the Board of Parks Commissioners, "for the men, as a rule, haven't much culture nor any well developed ideas on the subject of color aesthetics".

In 1917, with the Nelson-Atkins Museum yet to be built—although enjoying earlier momentum and available funds in the region to establish an art institution—Thayer donated her collection to the University of Kansas in Lawrence. There, it found a home in the Helen F. Spencer Museum of Art. In 2016, the Spencer Museum is scheduled to mount an exhibition featuring the Thayer collection and highlighting her commitment to women and their role in civic affairs and municipal culture.