On View: Dreams of This Future: The Peggy Cooper Cafritz Collection

ABOUT THIS EXHIBITION

This exhibition brings together a selection of works from a 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.

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