The artist Alix Ayme is not African American; therefore this piece is unique to the collection. This piece depicts a woman of the Congo, poignantly portrayed by Alix Ayme from a sitting in the early sixties; not long after the Congo had been liberated from Belgium. This is the same time frame that Kennedy wrote his Executive Order to ban discrimination in federally funded housing and Dr. Martin Luther King was arrested and wrote his famous "Letter from Birmingham Jail".

This drawing, soulfully rendered by a French artist who witnessed the brutal death of her son in a military execution by the Chinese, yielded three similar portraits of the female Congolese subject. One of the three portraits was acquired for the permanent collection by the Evergreen Museum at Johns Hopkins University in 2012 and is depicted in the artist's first US exhibition catalogue.

It seemed fitting to start the Petrucci Family Foundation Collection here with this image, with this indigenous African woman and to build the dialogue of this truly American collection from here - we are striving to answer the many questions that are apparent the eyes of the subject. We are honored to seek the answers through the work and the lives of important twentieth and twenty-first century African American Artists. - Hilary Pierce (June 2013)