During his childhood, Ronald Ollie’s parents took him regularly to the Saint Louis Museum of Art. During adulthood, he passionately collected the work of black abstract artists, American and British, many of them lesser known or unknown—and still so today. But that is changing, not least because Ollie and his wife, Monique, have given 81 works by black abstractionists, a collection named for Ollie’s parents, to the museum of his youth. “The Shape of Abstraction” draws from that collection, advocating for five generations of black artists, reaching back to the 1940s. —E.C.