More than 400 works by over 200 artists of African descent came to the Studio Museum in Harlem through one of the most consequential gifts in the institution’s history.
When Peggy Cooper Cafritz died in 2018, she divided more than 650 works between the Studio Museum and the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, two institutions that shared her lifelong belief in supporting Black artists before the wider culture decided they mattered. Now, in Dreams of This Future: The Collection of Peggy Cooper Cafritz, the Studio Museum brings selections from that transformative bequest into public view. Harlem audiences can see not only what Cafritz collected, but how she saw: with an eye for artists whose work expanded the story of Black life and the possibilities of American art.
The exhibition is more than a presentation of remarkable objects. It is the culmination of a philosophy Cafritz carried from the segregated South to Washington’s cultural and political circles: beauty could never be separated from the question of who was allowed to create it, own it and preserve it. To understand why she placed so much faith in artists before institutions did, the story begins in Mobile, Alabama.
Learning How to Look
Long before that gift reshaped the Studio Museum’s collection, Peggy Cooper Cafritz was a little girl learning how to look. Born Pearl Alice Cooper in 1947, she grew up in a prosperous Black household where achievement offered comfort, but no immunity from Jim Crow. Her father, Algernon Johnson Cooper Sr., was a successful businessman whose life insurance and mortuary businesses provided his family with opportunities unavailable to many Black families in the segregated South. Inside the Cooper home there were books, art and beautiful things. Outside its doors was an America determined to remind them that prosperity did not equal freedom.
By seven or eight, Peggy was fascinated by a print of Georges Braque’s Bottle and Fishes. She would study the Cubist composition, mentally rearranging its fractured forms and inventing stories around what she saw. Her mother, Gladys Mouton Cooper, encouraged that curiosity with books about European masters. But those books taught another lesson. Where were the Black faces? Where were the Black artists? Where was the beauty that looked like the people she knew?
That absence would become one of the defining questions of her life. Years later, Cafritz would put her philosophy plainly: “The absence of equity diminishes beauty.” For her, that was never simply a statement about museums. It was about power-who gets seen, who gets supported, whose work is preserved and who gets written into history.
From Civil Rights to Cultural Power
Politics arrived early in Peggy Cooper’s life. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. visited her family home while promoting Stride Toward Freedom, signing a copy for the young girl and encouraging her to follow the example of her father’s quiet leadership. But as the Civil Rights Movement accelerated, Peggy discovered that quiet leadership would not always be enough.
After attending an integrated boarding school in Indiana, she returned to Mobile during the summer following her high school graduation and joined an effort to test whether local restaurants were complying with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. At one establishment, she and her companions found themselves surrounded and threatened by an angry mob while police failed to protect them.
Soon afterward, she left Alabama for Washington, D.C. At George Washington University, where she was one of relatively few Black students, Peggy Cooper became an organizer. She helped found the university’s Black Peoples Union and pushed the institution to confront racial exclusion within campus fraternities and sororities. At the same time, another part of her education was beginning.
Her earliest art purchases did not come from fashionable galleries. She acquired African masks, sculpture and textiles from student activists connected to Howard University’s chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, who were selling objects brought back from Africa to help finance organizing efforts. For Cooper, buying art was already becoming something larger than possession. Money spent on Black culture could support Black people. An object could carry history. Collecting could become an act of solidarity.
Her interests soon expanded to artists including Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence. When gatekeepers frustrated her attempts to reach Lawrence while she was pursuing a television documentary about him, Cooper famously found his flight information and met him at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. The encounter began a lifelong friendship. It also revealed something fundamental about the way Peggy Cooper Cafritz would move through the art world: she wasn’t particularly interested in waiting for permission.
Building the Pipeline
Collecting established Black artists was important. But Cafritz came to believe that changing who appeared on museum walls required changing what happened long before an artist reached a museum. In 1968, while helping organize a citywide Black Arts Festival in Washington, she encountered young people with tremendous creative ability but limited access to the rigorous arts education that could turn talent into a profession.
Working with choreographer Mike Malone, she began building what would eventually become the Duke Ellington School of the Arts. The project started modestly with summer workshops at George Washington University. It grew into a year-round program, attracted faculty including Debbie Allen, and after years of lobbying found a permanent home in the former Western High School in Georgetown.
The Duke Ellington School of the Arts officially opened in 1974. Cafritz believed Black students deserved more than an arts education designed around somebody else’s expectations of Blackness. She rejected the notion that young Black artists should be expected to make work primarily about suffering, poverty or racial trauma. They should be free to make abstraction. Conceptual art. Performance. Geometry. Beauty. Provocation.
Whatever their imagination demanded. That philosophy helped nurture generations of creative talent. Ellington alumni would eventually include Hank Willis Thomas, Denyce Graves, Meshell Ndegeocello and Dave Chappelle. And Cafritz remained deeply involved. She chaired the Ellington Fund, supported its students and faculty, and bought their work. She wasn’t simply interested in discovering artists after the world decided they mattered. She wanted to be there before.
A House Full of Art
By the 1980s and 1990s, Cafritz had assembled one of the country’s significant private collections of African and African American art. Her eight-bedroom home on Chain Bridge Road in Washington became part residence, part salon and part private museum. Artists, activists, diplomats, curators and political figures gathered beneath walls crowded with work. Jacob Lawrence. Romare Bearden. Barkley L. Hendricks. Kara Walker. Kerry James Marshall. Carrie Mae Weems. Yinka Shonibare. El Anatsui.
More than 300 museum-quality works filled the house. But Cafritz did not collect simply to demonstrate taste. She developed relationships with artists. She visited studios. She bought work when careers were still forming. She understood that a purchase at the right moment could provide more than money-it could provide validation. By 2009, the collection had become important enough that O, The Oprah Magazine photographed the home and its art for its August issue.
Then, days before that issue appeared, the house burned. On July 29, 2009, a fire broke out while Cafritz was away. Firefighters arrived, but a nearby hydrant was unusable and inadequate water pressure hampered efforts to contain the blaze. By the time a sustained water supply could be established, the house was lost. So were more than 300 works of art, along with photographs, family objects and personal archives.
The art alone was estimated to be worth roughly $15 million. Artists reached out. El Anatsui offered to create replacement work. Cafritz declined. Trying to reconstruct the collection, she understood, would mean attempting to recreate a history that had already happened. Instead, she started again.
The Second Collection
What emerged from that loss may be the most revealing chapter of Peggy Cooper Cafritz’s life. She did not try to rebuild the first collection. She built a different one. In 2011, Cafritz moved into an industrial two-story duplex near Dupont Circle, remaking its concrete, steel and glass interior into an unconventional home for contemporary art.
And her collecting strategy shifted. Prices for many established African American masters had risen dramatically. Instead of chasing increasingly expensive historical works through the secondary market, Cafritz turned even more aggressively toward emerging and mid-career artists, international artists of the African diaspora and young people coming through institutions like Duke Ellington. Her new home quickly filled.
There were works by Leonardo Benzant, Mark Thomas Gibson, Njideka Akunyili Crosby and Iona Rozeal Brown. Painting met sculpture, textiles, photography and objects. Art climbed walls, occupied corners and hung from ceilings. Cafritz joked that her desire to collect had reached “diseased levels in my being.” In just seven years, she assembled more than 400 works by over 200 artists of African descent. And this time, she made certain the collection’s future would not depend upon the fate of a single house.
A Gift Built on Shared Belief
Peggy Cooper Cafritz died on February 18, 2018, at age 70. The bequest introduced at the beginning of this story was extraordinary. It was also the logical conclusion of Cafritz’s life’s work. The Studio Museum shared Cafritz’s belief in getting to artists early. For decades, its Artist-in-Residence program had given emerging artists something more valuable than applause after success: studio space, institutional support and room to develop before the larger art world had decided what their work was worth.
Cafritz collected the same way. She bought from young artists. She went into studios. She attended thesis exhibitions. She formed relationships before auction results and gallery representation told collectors where to look. Among the artists represented in the gift were Simone Leigh, Kerry James Marshall, Deana Lawson, Tschabalala Self, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Nick Cave, Titus Kaphar and Arcmanoro Niles. These were not simply objects transferred from one collection to another. They were evidence of an eye that repeatedly arrived early.
Dreams of This Future
The relationship between Peggy Cooper Cafritz and the Studio Museum takes on new resonance now. Across the exhibition, the full meaning of her gift comes into focus. The works reveal not simply what Cafritz collected, but how consistently she recognized possibility before the art establishment supplied its approval. Her collection did not wait for the traditional art establishment to certify Black artists as important.
Cafritz understood that certification itself was part of the problem. If museums, collectors and galleries continually waited for someone else to establish an artist’s value, the same artists would continue to be overlooked. Somebody had to take the first risk. Somebody had to buy the work, support the studio practice and insist that these artists belonged in the permanent cultural record.
Peggy Cooper Cafritz was willing to be that somebody. Her approach was instinctive, but it wasn’t careless. In conversations about her collecting, she described the process as “gut, eye, mind and heart.” The gut responded first. The eye recognized what was happening visually. The mind interrogated the ideas. And the heart connected her to the human being who had made it.
That last part matters. Cafritz’s legacy cannot be measured simply by counting the works she owned. The more important measure may be the number of artists who encountered her at a moment when being seen could change what came next.
Beauty Is Not Neutral
There is an elegant symmetry in Peggy Cooper Cafritz’s story arriving so powerfully in Harlem. As a child in Mobile, she stared at art books and noticed who was missing. As a young woman in Washington, she challenged institutions that excluded Black people. As an educator, she helped build a school where young artists could develop without having their imaginations prescribed for them.
As a collector, she used private resources to support artists before the marketplace had decided they were safe investments. And finally, she entrusted hundreds of those works to institutions that could make them part of the public inheritance. The fire at Chain Bridge Road could have turned her into a guardian of what had been lost.
Instead, she became an investor in what had not yet arrived. That may be the clearest expression of her legacy. Peggy Cooper Cafritz did not collect Black art because she believed it deserved a separate corner of American culture. She collected it because she understood that American culture was incomplete without it. She knew museums do more than display beauty. They help determine what a society remembers. And she understood something else long before much of the art establishment caught up: If the walls do not tell the whole story, change what hangs on the walls.
This Month’s Featured Articles
FeaturedHarlemEntertainmentHarlemHistory
Peggy Cooper Cafritz saw possibility in Black artists before the art establishment supplied its approval. Her historic bequest to the Studio Museum in Harlem now reveals how collecting, education and cultural power can help determine what America remembers.
Derriann Pharr, Simonette Quamina and Taylor Simmons became the first Artist-in-Residence cohort to work inside the Studio Museum in Harlem's purpose-built studios. Their exhibition, A sustained becoming, reveals three distinct approaches to the body, memory and the freedom to imagine what comes next.
Black horror has always known how to make fear political, laughter protective and darkness look magnificent. From Blacula and Ganja & Hess to Blade, Get Out and Vampire in Brooklyn, Black filmmakers have transformed the genre—and Harlem is ready to talk back to the screen.
Black filmmakers are no longer waiting for Hollywood's permission. From Harlem to the Harlems of the world, they are protecting their voices, owning their images and building new roads to audiences. The ABFF New York City Pop-Up shows what becomes possible when Black stories reach the screen on their own terms.
More than 400 works by over 200 artists of African descent came to the Studio Museum in Harlem through one of the most consequential gifts in the institution’s history.
When Peggy Cooper Cafritz died in 2018, she divided more than 650 works between the Studio Museum and the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, two institutions that shared her lifelong belief in supporting Black artists before the wider culture decided they mattered. Now, in Dreams of This Future: The Collection of Peggy Cooper Cafritz, the Studio Museum brings selections from that transformative bequest into public view. Harlem audiences can see not only what Cafritz collected, but how she saw: with an eye for artists whose work expanded the story of Black life and the possibilities of American art.
The exhibition is more than a presentation of remarkable objects. It is the culmination of a philosophy Cafritz carried from the segregated South to Washington’s cultural and political circles: beauty could never be separated from the question of who was allowed to create it, own it and preserve it. To understand why she placed so much faith in artists before institutions did, the story begins in Mobile, Alabama.
Learning How to Look
Long before that gift reshaped the Studio Museum’s collection, Peggy Cooper Cafritz was a little girl learning how to look. Born Pearl Alice Cooper in 1947, she grew up in a prosperous Black household where achievement offered comfort, but no immunity from Jim Crow. Her father, Algernon Johnson Cooper Sr., was a successful businessman whose life insurance and mortuary businesses provided his family with opportunities unavailable to many Black families in the segregated South. Inside the Cooper home there were books, art and beautiful things. Outside its doors was an America determined to remind them that prosperity did not equal freedom.
By seven or eight, Peggy was fascinated by a print of Georges Braque’s Bottle and Fishes. She would study the Cubist composition, mentally rearranging its fractured forms and inventing stories around what she saw. Her mother, Gladys Mouton Cooper, encouraged that curiosity with books about European masters. But those books taught another lesson. Where were the Black faces? Where were the Black artists? Where was the beauty that looked like the people she knew?
That absence would become one of the defining questions of her life. Years later, Cafritz would put her philosophy plainly: “The absence of equity diminishes beauty.” For her, that was never simply a statement about museums. It was about power-who gets seen, who gets supported, whose work is preserved and who gets written into history.
From Civil Rights to Cultural Power
Politics arrived early in Peggy Cooper’s life. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. visited her family home while promoting Stride Toward Freedom, signing a copy for the young girl and encouraging her to follow the example of her father’s quiet leadership. But as the Civil Rights Movement accelerated, Peggy discovered that quiet leadership would not always be enough.
After attending an integrated boarding school in Indiana, she returned to Mobile during the summer following her high school graduation and joined an effort to test whether local restaurants were complying with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. At one establishment, she and her companions found themselves surrounded and threatened by an angry mob while police failed to protect them.
Soon afterward, she left Alabama for Washington, D.C. At George Washington University, where she was one of relatively few Black students, Peggy Cooper became an organizer. She helped found the university’s Black Peoples Union and pushed the institution to confront racial exclusion within campus fraternities and sororities. At the same time, another part of her education was beginning.
Her earliest art purchases did not come from fashionable galleries. She acquired African masks, sculpture and textiles from student activists connected to Howard University’s chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, who were selling objects brought back from Africa to help finance organizing efforts. For Cooper, buying art was already becoming something larger than possession. Money spent on Black culture could support Black people. An object could carry history. Collecting could become an act of solidarity.
Her interests soon expanded to artists including Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence. When gatekeepers frustrated her attempts to reach Lawrence while she was pursuing a television documentary about him, Cooper famously found his flight information and met him at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. The encounter began a lifelong friendship. It also revealed something fundamental about the way Peggy Cooper Cafritz would move through the art world: she wasn’t particularly interested in waiting for permission.
Building the Pipeline
Collecting established Black artists was important. But Cafritz came to believe that changing who appeared on museum walls required changing what happened long before an artist reached a museum. In 1968, while helping organize a citywide Black Arts Festival in Washington, she encountered young people with tremendous creative ability but limited access to the rigorous arts education that could turn talent into a profession.
Working with choreographer Mike Malone, she began building what would eventually become the Duke Ellington School of the Arts. The project started modestly with summer workshops at George Washington University. It grew into a year-round program, attracted faculty including Debbie Allen, and after years of lobbying found a permanent home in the former Western High School in Georgetown.
The Duke Ellington School of the Arts officially opened in 1974. Cafritz believed Black students deserved more than an arts education designed around somebody else’s expectations of Blackness. She rejected the notion that young Black artists should be expected to make work primarily about suffering, poverty or racial trauma. They should be free to make abstraction. Conceptual art. Performance. Geometry. Beauty. Provocation.
Whatever their imagination demanded. That philosophy helped nurture generations of creative talent. Ellington alumni would eventually include Hank Willis Thomas, Denyce Graves, Meshell Ndegeocello and Dave Chappelle. And Cafritz remained deeply involved. She chaired the Ellington Fund, supported its students and faculty, and bought their work. She wasn’t simply interested in discovering artists after the world decided they mattered. She wanted to be there before.
A House Full of Art
By the 1980s and 1990s, Cafritz had assembled one of the country’s significant private collections of African and African American art. Her eight-bedroom home on Chain Bridge Road in Washington became part residence, part salon and part private museum. Artists, activists, diplomats, curators and political figures gathered beneath walls crowded with work. Jacob Lawrence. Romare Bearden. Barkley L. Hendricks. Kara Walker. Kerry James Marshall. Carrie Mae Weems. Yinka Shonibare. El Anatsui.
More than 300 museum-quality works filled the house. But Cafritz did not collect simply to demonstrate taste. She developed relationships with artists. She visited studios. She bought work when careers were still forming. She understood that a purchase at the right moment could provide more than money-it could provide validation. By 2009, the collection had become important enough that O, The Oprah Magazine photographed the home and its art for its August issue.
Then, days before that issue appeared, the house burned. On July 29, 2009, a fire broke out while Cafritz was away. Firefighters arrived, but a nearby hydrant was unusable and inadequate water pressure hampered efforts to contain the blaze. By the time a sustained water supply could be established, the house was lost. So were more than 300 works of art, along with photographs, family objects and personal archives.
The art alone was estimated to be worth roughly $15 million. Artists reached out. El Anatsui offered to create replacement work. Cafritz declined. Trying to reconstruct the collection, she understood, would mean attempting to recreate a history that had already happened. Instead, she started again.
The Second Collection
What emerged from that loss may be the most revealing chapter of Peggy Cooper Cafritz’s life. She did not try to rebuild the first collection. She built a different one. In 2011, Cafritz moved into an industrial two-story duplex near Dupont Circle, remaking its concrete, steel and glass interior into an unconventional home for contemporary art.
And her collecting strategy shifted. Prices for many established African American masters had risen dramatically. Instead of chasing increasingly expensive historical works through the secondary market, Cafritz turned even more aggressively toward emerging and mid-career artists, international artists of the African diaspora and young people coming through institutions like Duke Ellington. Her new home quickly filled.
There were works by Leonardo Benzant, Mark Thomas Gibson, Njideka Akunyili Crosby and Iona Rozeal Brown. Painting met sculpture, textiles, photography and objects. Art climbed walls, occupied corners and hung from ceilings. Cafritz joked that her desire to collect had reached “diseased levels in my being.” In just seven years, she assembled more than 400 works by over 200 artists of African descent. And this time, she made certain the collection’s future would not depend upon the fate of a single house.
A Gift Built on Shared Belief
Peggy Cooper Cafritz died on February 18, 2018, at age 70. The bequest introduced at the beginning of this story was extraordinary. It was also the logical conclusion of Cafritz’s life’s work. The Studio Museum shared Cafritz’s belief in getting to artists early. For decades, its Artist-in-Residence program had given emerging artists something more valuable than applause after success: studio space, institutional support and room to develop before the larger art world had decided what their work was worth.
Cafritz collected the same way. She bought from young artists. She went into studios. She attended thesis exhibitions. She formed relationships before auction results and gallery representation told collectors where to look. Among the artists represented in the gift were Simone Leigh, Kerry James Marshall, Deana Lawson, Tschabalala Self, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Nick Cave, Titus Kaphar and Arcmanoro Niles. These were not simply objects transferred from one collection to another. They were evidence of an eye that repeatedly arrived early.
Dreams of This Future
The relationship between Peggy Cooper Cafritz and the Studio Museum takes on new resonance now. Across the exhibition, the full meaning of her gift comes into focus. The works reveal not simply what Cafritz collected, but how consistently she recognized possibility before the art establishment supplied its approval. Her collection did not wait for the traditional art establishment to certify Black artists as important.
Cafritz understood that certification itself was part of the problem. If museums, collectors and galleries continually waited for someone else to establish an artist’s value, the same artists would continue to be overlooked. Somebody had to take the first risk. Somebody had to buy the work, support the studio practice and insist that these artists belonged in the permanent cultural record.
Peggy Cooper Cafritz was willing to be that somebody. Her approach was instinctive, but it wasn’t careless. In conversations about her collecting, she described the process as “gut, eye, mind and heart.” The gut responded first. The eye recognized what was happening visually. The mind interrogated the ideas. And the heart connected her to the human being who had made it.
That last part matters. Cafritz’s legacy cannot be measured simply by counting the works she owned. The more important measure may be the number of artists who encountered her at a moment when being seen could change what came next.
Beauty Is Not Neutral
There is an elegant symmetry in Peggy Cooper Cafritz’s story arriving so powerfully in Harlem. As a child in Mobile, she stared at art books and noticed who was missing. As a young woman in Washington, she challenged institutions that excluded Black people. As an educator, she helped build a school where young artists could develop without having their imaginations prescribed for them.
As a collector, she used private resources to support artists before the marketplace had decided they were safe investments. And finally, she entrusted hundreds of those works to institutions that could make them part of the public inheritance. The fire at Chain Bridge Road could have turned her into a guardian of what had been lost.
Instead, she became an investor in what had not yet arrived. That may be the clearest expression of her legacy. Peggy Cooper Cafritz did not collect Black art because she believed it deserved a separate corner of American culture. She collected it because she understood that American culture was incomplete without it. She knew museums do more than display beauty. They help determine what a society remembers. And she understood something else long before much of the art establishment caught up: If the walls do not tell the whole story, change what hangs on the walls.
This Month’s Featured Articles
FeaturedHarlemEntertainmentHarlemHistory
Peggy Cooper Cafritz saw possibility in Black artists before the art establishment supplied its approval. Her historic bequest to the Studio Museum in Harlem now reveals how collecting, education and cultural power can help determine what America remembers.
Derriann Pharr, Simonette Quamina and Taylor Simmons became the first Artist-in-Residence cohort to work inside the Studio Museum in Harlem's purpose-built studios. Their exhibition, A sustained becoming, reveals three distinct approaches to the body, memory and the freedom to imagine what comes next.
Black horror has always known how to make fear political, laughter protective and darkness look magnificent. From Blacula and Ganja & Hess to Blade, Get Out and Vampire in Brooklyn, Black filmmakers have transformed the genre—and Harlem is ready to talk back to the screen.
Black filmmakers are no longer waiting for Hollywood's permission. From Harlem to the Harlems of the world, they are protecting their voices, owning their images and building new roads to audiences. The ABFF New York City Pop-Up shows what becomes possible when Black stories reach the screen on their own terms.
