Sad news form Washington DC.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/08/arts/design/08cafritz.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/08/us/08fire.html

The $5.2 million mansion of Peggy Cooper Cafritz, 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.