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.

Anacostia Art Gallery
& Boutique
2806 Bruce Place, SE
Washington, DC 20020

202-610-4188