Fired Up! Ready to Go!: Finding Beauty, Demanding Equity: An African American Life in Art. The Collections of Peggy Cooper Cafritz by Peggy Cooper Cafritz (review)

This book has a long title, but it is necessary. Fired Up! Ready to Go! is more than a survey of the "the collections of Peggy Cooper Cafritz," the long-time supporter of contemporary African American and African diaspora artists, whose initial collection was destroyed in a fire in 2009. The book is also a chronicle of institution-building and arts advocacy. And, most memorably, it is a biography told through Cooper Cafritz's words, her art, and the recollections of her art world friends.

For beginners, a standard question might be, "Who is Peggy Copper Cafritz?"

"She is a terrestrial constellation connecting stars across galaxies in the fine art universe" (203), writes artist Hank Willis Thomas. Willis Thomas gives us this imaginative response after first describing Cooper Cafritz as both a "legend" and a "force of nature." With "constellation," Willis Thomas aimed for something more visual and unbound that could convey the potency of Cooper Cafritz's reach.

While few black art cognoscenti would need to ask who Cooper Cafritz is, seldom few may know the legend beyond her defining roles as the founder of the Duke Ellington School for the Arts in Washington, D.C.; as a co-chair of the Cultural Equity Committee of the Smithsonian; and as an avid collector of African American, African, and Caribbean artists. That is why this book is so necessary.

Every page is a gift. Every sentence a revelation. The images provide their own wondrous provocation. But it is Cooper Cafritz's pointed storytelling that solidifies this volume's place in African American art history and black biography/memoir.

Readers are rewarded from the beginning with "Soul Memories," Cooper Cafritz's first-person essay—a substantive, straight-ahead dive into how she developed into the passionate advocate and institution builder renowned in the national arts community. As Cooper Cafritz details, her upbringing in segregated Mobile, Alabama was framed by "everything separate, everyone separated, every place we could not go, every event we could not attend. Everything a fight" (23). The college-educated Cooper family lived surrounded by books and art. A Georges Braque print hung in their dining room, and whenever bored, Cooper Cafritz looked to it to whet her imagination. There was a children's library in their family room, but she preferred venturing into her father's private library, which had a section of books by and about black people, alongside classics of the Western canon.

Her political education was far-ranging. On one occasion, the Coopers welcomed Martin Luther King, Jr. to their home where he would inscribe his latest book, Strive Toward Freedom, for the impressionable sixth grader—a memorable event for a girl who was already developing a fire in her belly against injustice. On another occasion, she met Gordon Parks who had been taking photos of poverty in Mobile. The conditions incensed her. Cooper Cafritz explains that such experiences during childhood "probably coalesced the anger and the creativity, because my creativity has never been separated from my political anger" (253), she says.

In the intimacies of Cooper Cafritz's story—often told in her own words or those of individuals who were very close to her—we begin to understand "a life," as the lengthy title indicates. We go with her to boarding school, university, and law school. We learn about brothers and sisters, and fellow students. There is not much detail about her marriage to and divorce from Conrad Cafritz, but we learn about her children—fostered, birthed, and adopted. Cooper Cafritz details her "spectacularly lucky professional life" in contrast to a series of brutal and tortuous events that left her an "emotional wreck" in her twenties (33). Art brought her comfort in the tumultuous times.

Studying and settling in D.C. enhanced Cooper Cafritz's exposure to...