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(Alliance News Service) —
Dollar Signs on the Wall
Alliance member finds unexpected value in painting

“A social services agency that had its funding cut this year has found a benefactor in an unlikely place—it’s wall.”

That’s how a June 14, 2007, article in The Record newspaper summarizes the $70,000 that was unexpectedly earned by Bergen Family Center, Hackensack, N.J., an Alliance for Children and Families member. The amount was garnered after the sale of a painting that had, since 1975, been assumed to be a standard wall hanging—not the high-priced piece of art that it truly was.

“We never really investigated the painting’s worth,” says Mitch Schonfeld, president and CEO of Bergen Family Center. “We didn’t know it was valuable. We kept it really, just for sentimental reasons.”

The abstract painting, which hung in the organization’s Englewood, N.J., office, was donated in 1975 by a local chapter of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority. The donation was made in honor of Ethel McGhee Davis, who was an Alpha Kappa Alpha sister and Englewood’s first black social worker. Davis worked for the Bergen Family Center during the 1920s, Schonfeld says.

The sorority sisters paid painter Hale Woodruff $600 for a piece they felt would be appropriate to honor Davis and donated it to the Bergen Family Center, where it hung on the wall until its new modern-day value was identified.

“I specialize in the history of African American art, so I was very familiar with the artist,” says Jim Edmonds, who is credited with alerting Schonfeld to the painting’s worth. Edmonds, an artist, had been invited to Bergen Family Center to teach as part of a teen program that involved several cultural enrichment components.

“I asked the staff if they realized what they had sitting there,” Edmonds says. “I didn’t know how much it was worth off the top of my head, but I know the market, so I told Mitch, ‘This painting is probably worth over $50,000.’”

Edmonds chuckles as he recalls Schonfeld’s reaction to that news: “Mitch immediately took it down and put it in the office.”

Due to the renewed interest in the work and style of painter Hale Woodruff, who died in 1980, Bergen Family Center received several sizable offers for the piece. Ultimately the center sold the painting for $80,000 to a gallery owner in New York City and received a $70,000 profit after paying a broker’s commission.

Immediately, the proceeds were used to avoid cuts to the working hours of a nurse, dance therapist, and art therapist, all time that would have been slashed due to impending budget restrictions. Additional money from the sale will fund future programs.

“I’ve never walked into a place and seen something like that just hanging on the wall,” Edmonds says. “I was shocked to see it. For some people, finding that painting would be the equivalent of going down into a basement and finding a Picasso. It really was quite an interesting find.”

Where the painting once stood, the center will hang a plaque to thank the sorority for its donation.

 

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