Education
Columbia University; Sarah Lawrence College. Teachers College.
Columbia University; Sarah Lawrence College. Teachers College.
Over fifty years, Burke acquired the largest private collection of Japanese art outside Japan. Her collection grew so large that she housed it in a separate apartment adjacent to her own on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. In 1985, portions of her collection were exhibited at the Tokyo National Museum, becoming the first Western collection of Japanese art to be displayed at the museum.
Burke was born Mary Livingston Griggs in Saint Paul, Minnesota, on June 20, 1916, to Theodore West. Griggs and Mary Steele Livingston.
Her mother was the grandniece of General Henry Hastings Sibley, the first Governor of Minnesota.
Burke received her bachelor"s degree from Sarah Lawrence College in 1938 and earned a Master"s degree in clinical psychology from Columbia University. Mary Griggs Burke died at her home in Manhattan, New York City, on December 8, 2012, at the age 96.
Her vast collection of Japanese art was divided between the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts following her death, as she had announced previously in 2006.
On March 16, 2015 the two museums jointly announced the details of their respective bequests. In addition to her home in New York City, she kept a winter home in Florida and a second house in Cable, Wisconsin.