Mary Griggs Burke

[1] Her collection grew so large that she housed it in a separate apartment adjacent to her own on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

[2] She also inherited Forest Lodge, a family lake-side property on Lake Namakagon near Cable, Wisconsin which she loved dearly; that property was left to Northland College in Ashland, Wisconsin, along with a $10-million endowment to create the Mary Griggs Burke Center for Freshwater Innovation.

On May 10, 1973, her foundation purchased their first art piece: a pair of six-panel folding screens by Kano Sanraku (1559-1635) titled View of the West Lake.

[1] During a brief stay in Japan, art dealers in both Kyoto and Tokyo gave Burke the nickname "姫 (hime)" which translates to "princess" due to her modesty, enthusiasm, and intellectual curiosity, which at the time were attributes associated with the aristocracy.

Burke had also made her collection open to students as she was a devoted patron of Miyeko Murase’s graduate teaching program at Columbia University, New York.