In Memoriam: James E. Powers Jr.

Brooklyn native James E. Powers Jr. ’63, a Wagner business graduate and Seahawk baseball player, died on April 4 of Covid-19 complications in a Manhattan hospital. Powers had worked for Frigidaire after graduation before becoming a medical supplies salesman. In 1965 he married alumna Beverly Ann Phipps ’63, a social worker. They were enthusiastic collectors of Black art, and when Powers was laid off in the 1980s, the couple decided to open the Spiral Gallery in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, named in honor of the Spiral Group, a short-lived collective of Black artists formed in the early 1960s. Active in the late 1980s and early ’90s, the gallery became a community known for nurturing Black artists and serving art-lovers.