A dying gallery owner's African art collection numbers 15,000 pieces. His family wants to find it a home

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Set us as preferred Known in Los Angeles art circles for his vast collection of African art and legendary dinner parties, Ernest “Ernie” Wolfe III has spent a lifetime accumulating art, friends and stories.Now, as Wolfe, 75, suffers from a traumatic brain injury that has left him unable to move or speak, his family is trying to find homes for the collection that has defined him: about 15,000 works of African art of undetermined value.Some fill his namesake gallery (also known as Turkana) on Sawtelle Boulevard; others are kept in a warehouse whose rent has become difficult to sustain, said his eldest son, Ernest Wolfe IV, 34.The collection’s history also includes longstanding questions about Wolfe’s collecting and sale of vigango, ancestral memorial sculptures made by Mijikenda peoples along Kenya’s coast that researchers later found to have been stolen before being sold — a situation Wolfe once said “horrified and deeply saddened” him.“My first choice would be to find that one person who might exist on the planet who would love to have all of it,” said Wolfe’s wife, Diane Wolfe, 72, while acknowledging that keeping the collection intact “is not necessarily realistic.”A Santa Monica native who grew up in Sherman Oaks, Wolfe first traveled to Kenya in 1973, shortly after graduating from Williams College.

He soon began teaching scuba diving there and started the field-collecting that ultimately led to his career in African art.Friends and family describe Wolfe as a force of nature, often dressed in camouflage shorts and ready with stories of his travels, fishing expeditions and the objects surrounding him.His place in the Los Angeles art world was defined as much by his dinner parties as by the art he housed.He began with Kenyan utilitarian objects and commemorative sculptures before expanding into whatever captured his attention.

According to his wife, the collection includes more than 8...