This exhibition brings together a selection of works from an historic gift to the Studio Museum in Harlem by Peggy Cooper Cafritz (1947–2018) to celebrate her legacy as an advocate for the arts and her lifelong commitment to artists and their practices. An arts patron, educator, and civil rights activist, Cafritz bequeathed the majority of her art collection to the Studio Museum and the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, a public school in Washington, DC, which she cofounded in 1974. While the Museum has shown dozens of works from this collection in the years since receiving the gift, this exhibition is the first to tell a story of Cafritz as an art collector.


A tireless supporter of the arts, Cafritz built two art collections during her lifetime. The first was largely destroyed in a 2009 fire; the second was amassed in the seven years prior to her death. Both collections spoke to her unyielding commitment to artists of African descent. Voracious in her interests, Cafritz collected across media—with paintings, photographs, sculptures, textiles, and works on paper represented in this exhibition—but with a firm commitment to championing artists from the earliest stages of their careers.


Cafritz described one aspect of her approach to collecting as a “relentless search for beauty,” which “has always been, in part, a political act.” Her bequest to the Museum included over four hundred works by more than two hundred artists of African descent, many of whom had not previously been represented in the Museum’s collection. Although this exhibition contains just a small fraction of this generous gift, it attempts to evince the radical act of equity, beauty, and permanence that Cafritz imparted to the Museum.