Perched at the top of
the hill on Bruce Place in South East D.C., you will find a truly
surreal site. Vibrantly painted and teeming with artwork
principally from Africa and the Caribbean, this place has undoubtedly
caused confused gazes in this neighborhood. Confusion quickly
yields to fascination. At first glance, one would think a tornado
transported and then abandoned this treasure, but there it sits—a home,
but more precisely, a living piece of art or “a big ol’ colored house
up on the hill . . .” as owner and creator, Juanita “Busy Bee” Britton,
proudly calls it. Welcome to the Anacostia Art Gallery and
Boutique! It is Britton’s brainchild.
“Busy Bee” is a dynamo who lives up to her
moniker. She buzzes around ceaselessly engaged in a stream of
activities. “They call me Busy Bee for a reason. Nobody
knows about my 4 a.m. stories,” she says with smile.
Indeed, there
are the 4 a.m. wake-up calls for work. She is
a partner in Paradies-BZB, DC, which runs such retail stores as Brooks
Brothers, CNBC, and PGA stores in D.C. area airports. There are
also the phone calls to negotiate the final touches on Random Acts, a
project that came to her in a dream and is now quite real in the form
of a charity and a film on her sisterly outreach in Africa. Most
recently, Britton returned from Senegal, South Africa, and Swaziland
where she rented a small bus and randomly reached out to others whom
she felt could use a small act of kindness to lift their spirits.
During her random
acts of kindness, she also collected art, which
she regards as a true privilege. She says, “I have always been a
collector of things . . . I love beautiful things.” On every
trip, I “make it a point to make sure that I go to the art district,”
she continued.
Her home, much like
her gallery, is bejeweled with breath taking
artwork. As I walked up her front steps to the interview, to my
left, on her lawn, I noticed the sculpture of a young man awkwardly
floating on his back; held up by what looks to be intertwining spools
of metal rings. On the tree to my right, giant African face masks
alternately menaced and greeted me. This is the home of an art
collector. When asked how she selects artwork for her home versus
those she displays at the gallery, she giggles guiltily adding, “there
are some pieces that I see and I have to take [them] home.”
As for her thoughts
on the notion of art collecting being an art
that requires a specific skill set, she agreed that there is an art to
collecting, but that is not necessarily her perception of her
process. “I have to be attracted to the piece. It has to be
natural. It has to hit!” Britton believes in the work of
artists who are creative, whose “art represents culture,” and who
possess what she calls the “third eye,” pointing to her forehead.
“I’m easy. I don’t have criteria. My criterion is what I
like and what strikes me.”
In the immediate
future, Britton wants to work more closely with
microeconomics projects such as GonRule, which applies fair trade
practices, meaning they pay indigenous people more for their products
than they would have traditionally been able to muster from Western
companies themselves. In the long term, she hopes to be offered
the position of U.S. ambassador, which she would promptly reject and
forgo the bureaucracy. She would rather be busy being an
ambassador on her own terms: traveling the world and collecting
art that “hits.
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Anacostia Art Gallery
& Boutique
2806 Bruce Place, SE
Washington, DC 20020
www.bzbinternational.com
busybee@bzbinternational.com
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