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The featured image is titled Peggy Cooper Cafritz (2020), acrylic on canvas, 16"x20", Gina McKlveen. Image: © and TM Gina McKlveen. All rights reserved.

Peggy Cooper Cafritz grew up in Mobile, Alabama under Jim Crow laws during the days of racial segregation in the Southern United States of America. She moved to Washington, DC in 1964 to attend college at The George Washington University, where she was instrumental in creating organizations for Black students on campus. Continuing her education at George Washington University Law School, she graduated with her Juris Doctor degree in 1971. Cafritz was significantly involved in the arts community while she was a student, serving on boards, chairing committees, and planning several festivals in the nation's capital. However, Cafritz solidified her support for the arts when she co-founded the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, a public high school located in Washington, DC that focuses on arts education. Throughout her lifetime, Cafritz developed an extensive art collection primarily of works by artists of African descent as a means to address the absence and confront the erasure of Black history in the United States. She passed away in 2018, gifting portions of her art collection between the Duke Ellington School of the Arts in DC and the Studio Museum in Harlem, NY. 

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© Stephanie Drawdy [2025]