In Collection’s Ashes, a Heritage’s Seeds

WASHINGTON — Every morning Peggy Cooper Cafritz steps outside and confronts the wreckage: the acrid smell of her incinerated walls and furnishings, the police tape clinging to a chain-link fence surrounding her property, the rumbling backhoe hauling away the charred remains of her longtime home.

She has been living in the house of a friend across the street from this scene, which she matter-of-factly calls “the ruins.” And for the moment, at least, she is all business, filling out insurance forms, talking to fire investigators and real estate brokers, replying to scores of e-mail messages and letters of sympathy. She has not had time, she says, to weep or grieve.

So, when asked about her loss, Ms. Cafritz hesitates. Her $5.2 million mansion here in the Kent neighborhood of northwest Washington held one of the largest private collections of African-American and African art in the country, more than 300 sculptures, paintings, photographs and other pieces that she painstakingly accumulated over the past two decades, often from artists whose careers she had personally nurtured.

The works of 19th- and 20th-century painters like Edward Mitchell Bannister, Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden hung amid contemporary work by artists like Hank Willis Thomas, Nick Cave, Kara Walker and Kerry James Marshall. Virtually everything was destroyed in the blaze that gutted the house on July 29, while she and her son were on vacation in Martha’s Vineyard.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/08/arts/design/08cafritz.html?_r=2&ref=design

This hurts...Bearden was one of my dad's favorites (he owned several reproductions)

it was that Cafritz used her money to support these unknown young African-American artists when they needed the money. They got paid. I have no doubt that she will re-build her collection with new works.

She was also responsible for creating the Duke Ellington School for the Arts in DC, and is former head of the school board, among many other public services she has performed.

...for the loss of kara walker's work alone. :cry::( i adore her work, and plan to own a piece by her someday.

which isn't to say the other works aren't a tremendous loss (as they are, of course). just to say, i'm a fan of walker's in particular.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kara_Walker