NASHVILLE (AP) — The Tennessee State Museum is being given more than 300 artworks by Nashville native Red Grooms.

The Tennessean reports (http://tnne.ws/2anXrpY) that the artworks are being donated from the collection of Walter and Sarah Knestrick. They include 238 graphic artworks, plus 52 commercially printed posters.

Walter Knestrick is a former chairman of the Tennessee Arts Commission who was a childhood friends with Grooms in Nashville, where they were both 1955 graduates of Hillsboro High School. Knestrick began collecting Grooms' works since his friend began doodling in the fifth grade.

"We both painted all through high school and I just always believed he would be something else," Knestrick said

Grooms later moved to New York, where he gained international fame for his sculptures, paintings, installation art and filmmaking.

Knestrick says he had long wanted to donate the collection, but didn't find the current location of the state museum in the basement of the Tennessee Performing Arts Center to be a suitable space. That changed with the construction of a new Tennessee State Museum, which is scheduled to open in 2018.

"I didn't want all that art to be under the performing art center with no place to show it," Knestrick said.

Lois Riggins-Ezzell, the museum's executive director, called the gift "the singularly most significant collection of contemporary art ever donated to the Tennessee State Museum."

Grooms' work is expected to be featured in a new art exhibit once the new the museum is complete.

The state museum has another signature Grooms piece in storage: the Tennessee Fox Trot Carousel that once stood in downtown Nashville. The merry-go-round has been described by the artist as a "sculpto-pictorama" of 36 rideable sculptures and 28 painted panels featuring the likenesses of prominent Tennesseans, animals and state symbols and songs.

"Red Grooms was lost to New York in 1957 when he moved there to live and work as an artist," said then-Nashville Mayor Phil Bredesen when the $1.75 million carousel was installed. "This way, we get a little piece of him back in our community."

But within four years of opening, leaks in its pavilion were causing water damage to the carousel and it was sold to the state and put into storage. Grooms fans have been hoping for the carousel to become part of the new state museum, but officials have not indicated any plans to do so.

Grooms told the weekly Nashville Scene earlier this year that he and wife Lysiane are hoping the carousel comes out of storage.

"I wouldn't care if we put a canvas top on it and use it in the summer, and then just packed it with the weather," he said. "It's a whole generation that has missed the whole thing, and I hope it would have been entertaining for them."