Kafi Benz (born 1941) is an American author and artist who began participation in social entrepreneurship through environmental preservation and regional planning in 1959 as a member of the Jersey Jetport Site Association, which opposed plans by the New York Port Authority to found a new airport in the Great Swamp, the central feature of a massive 55-square-mile watershed in New Jersey bounded to the south and east by the Watchung Mountains, 30 miles west of Manhattan.
During the 1980s, she also became very active in historic preservation, founding a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization, Friends of Seagate Inc., for that purpose. The organization later was expanded to include concerns for additional areas in the arts and sciences. At the same time, she founded the official web site of the sculptor Jim Gary. In 2001, it was moved to another web site she created and planned to be able to feature other artists as well, Kafi Benz Productions.
Born during 1941 in Chatham, New Jersey, her mother was a commercial artist, graphic designer, and illustrator and her father was a prominent physician and surgeon who also was chief of staff at a hospital in Morristown, president of several medical societies, and trustee of the state medical association.
Initial environmental conservation
The Jersey Jetport Site Association was a small, but effective conservation organization, circumventing the efforts of the Port Authority to replace Newark Airport with a much larger complex farther to the west. After infiltrating meetings of the powerful authority headed by Austin J. Tobin, that were held to marshal support among construction companies and unions, the members of the association distributed opposition literature and drew public attention to its efforts. Greater opposition arose among the residents of the massive area that would be affected once the issue was revealed by coverage of the expulsion of four of the JJSA members (Kafi Benz, Joan Kelly, Esty Weiss, and Betty White) from a meeting at a Newark hotel, the Essex House, in a local newspaper, the Newark Evening News, on Thursday, December 3, 1959. Coverage quickly included publications such as the New York Times.
The JJSA was closely followed by a sister organization, a new sub-committee founded in Washington, D.C. within the North American Wildlife Foundation, and these combined efforts led quickly to the establishment of the park that would become the Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge by an act of Congress on Thursday, November 3, 1960. Residents such as Geraldine R. Dodge and Marcellus Hartley Dodge, Sr. contributed the funds necessary to purchase the core of the swamp as the legal opposition progressed into a victory for the preservationists that led to the perpetual protection of the important natural habitat. Along with providing the funds to seek other donors, the influence of such prominent residents opened doors to legislators. Marcellus Dodge also was instrumental in establishing dialogue with established conservation groups.
The initial donation of land to the federal government as a park was 2,600 acres (11 km2). The park now consists of 7,600 acres (31 km2) or almost 12 square miles of varied habitats. It was declared a National Natural Landmark in 1966 and given wilderness status in 1968.
During the final period of the founding of the park, United States Secretary of the Interior Stewart Lee Udall headed the federal department that was in charge of parks. He supported the efforts of these conservationists and commented that he believed they mounted the greatest effort ever made by residents in America to protect a natural habitat. Several national news magazines also noted the success the tiny organization achieved.
In 2023, her home town named a room of a new municipal community center in one of its historic buildings to honor Benz for her role in the effort to protect the Great Swamp.
In the late 1960s, Benz became a director of the Somerset Art Association, then located in Bernardsville, New Jersey, exhibited fine art, and participated in the planning and administration of its annual competitive regional art show. The organization has been renamed as, The Center for Contemporary Art (CCA), is located in Bedminster, and is noted as a regional art center with a comprehensive studio art school, professional exhibition program, and a community outreach component. Her painting and sculpture works are held in private collections in several states. Occasionally sitting as a model for sculpture classes taught at the association by Berta Margoulies (a 1946 Guggenheim fellowship recipient), many sculptures of Benz have been exhibited by these students.
At that time a friendship with sculptor Jim Gary developed that would lead to her representing the sculptor at many times, eventually becoming his publicist, creating and maintaining the official web site for Gary and his work, and becoming the director of his studio, Jim Gary's Twentieth Century Dinosaurs, marketing and placing his works and exhibition.
When Gary died in January 2006, Benz established a memorial fund and led efforts to bring about the placement of sculptures from his traveling exhibition, as a single collection in a suitable museum or institution where the sculptures in the collection would remain open to the public. By 2009, negotiations with a site in Sarasota seemed assured and much publicity ensued, through 2010. That contract was not executed, however, and negotiations were redirected successfully to a museum in Tallahassee.
In August 2011, twenty-one Gary sculptures were packed into vans and moved from Colts Neck, New Jersey for a ten-year display at the Tallahassee Museum in Florida. When National Geographic Magazine was unable to meet the schedule, Benz invited three free-lance photographers to document the preparations and complex move with videos and still photographs.
She represented painter Lee W. Hughes also, principally while he was a transparent watercolor artist, with a studio and gallery in Mendham, New Jersey. She also represented his wife and her longtime friend, pencil medium artist Sue Hughes (née McQuillan), while she was working out of a studio in New Jersey and later, in California.
A search committee headed by Virginia Laudano, of the Art Club of Sun City Center, invited Kafi Benz to judge its thirty-sixth annual art show held during February 2003 jointly with the prominent Tampa Bay area multi-media artist, Gainor Roberts. Soon thereafter, Benz participated in a project with transparent watercolor artist, John Crawford, to publish his research of an early Renoir painting of Marie Le Coeur, that was among his art collection since its acquisition in Chicago during the 1930s. He is the namesake of the John Crawford Art Education Studio that was created after his death at SouthShore Regional Library of Hillsborough County, which now features many of his own paintings. The planned book was not published before his death.
Among several positions working with Denise Kowal, the founder of the Sarasota Chalk Festival, in 2012, Benz became the manager of its mural committee, ‘’Going Vertical’’, locating sites and co-ordinating the work of the international artists who performed their work as muralists on buildings in the region as part of the festival. During this time she developed a relationship with the French graffiti artist, MTO, that eventually, led to Benz being identified by him as the curator for several of the murals he later created independently.
During the festival of 2012, MTO had become the subject of intense focus in the community because of curious interpretations of some of his murals, that grew into a veritable polarized controversy, perpetuated by those projecting those unsupported interpretations. The controversy raged on for months and led to the destruction of the huge mural that provoked it, dubbed Fast Life (although it was intended as Fat Lie). In response to the controversy and removal, additional murals were created in the area by MTO through "Going Vertical" and private funding, two of which were facilitated by Benz.