She Goes Into Bergen County Basements and Rescues What We Leave Behind

There is a particular moment at an estate sale when an object seems to cross an invisible line. On one side, it is somebody’s possession. On the other, it is the thing nobody wants.

Kathy Baruffi likes that moment.

She likes old wood and worn metal, handmade boxes and peculiar remnants whose purposes have become unclear. She likes the evidence of hands. She likes curves. She likes things that appear to contain part of a story, even when nobody left behind can tell her how the story began. In the basements and garages of Bergen County houses, particularly the older ones, she has learned to look past the objects that announce their value and toward the ones sitting quietly on a workbench.

“I favor things that tell part of a story,” she told me, “the authenticity of worn metal and wood remnants that were saved on a basement work table, usually for adaptive re-use.”

Then she brings them home.

Baruffi lives across the state line in Piermont, New York, where she has been for more than forty-five years. She grew up in the Midwest, attended the University of Wisconsin, spent a year in Italy, and arrived in New York by boat from Europe. She stayed. When she and her former husband decided to start a family, Manhattan began to seem less practical. He was an artist and could work from anywhere. They looked north and eventually found Piermont, which at the time was a sleepy former mill town with a noon whistle and fewer than ten shops.

Baruffi remembers it before the restaurants and boutiques, before remote work loosened New York City’s gravitational pull, before the influx of money that she says accelerated during the pandemic. She also remembers that her generation was once the new generation arriving in town.

“We were the upstarts,” she told me during my visit. “Now there’s a whole other generation.”

Her house feels like an archive of all the generations that came before and a workshop for whatever might happen next.

There are paintings and wooden rulers, ceramic birds and pieces of violins. There are boxes that once carried tools and fragments that once belonged to objects whose original identities are now beside the point. A tiny German Christmas ornament has been liberated from its clip and glued somewhere entirely unexpected. Ceramic balls purchased from the family of an artist who owned a kiln reappear in different pieces. Old paintings acquire new shapes. A hand-carved horse meets a box of train tracks.

Nothing seems especially concerned with behaving according to its original instructions.

VIDEO: INSIDE KATHY BARUFFI’S HOME + ART TOUR: Step inside Kathy Baruffi’s Piermont home, where found objects, rescued paintings and forgotten pieces from Bergen County houses become material for something new.

Baruffi calls much of what she does “play,” a word she uses without apology. Her great artistic influence is Joseph Cornell, the twentieth-century American artist known for his assemblages and shadow boxes. She remembers seeing an exhibition of Cornell’s work at the Art Institute of Chicago as she was nearing retirement at seventy. By then, she had spent much of adulthood doing what adulthood tends to require: becoming educated, building a career, raising a family, attending to responsibilities.

Cornell reminded her of something.

Kindergarten.

A table covered with materials. A teacher who puts them there. The permission to see what happens.

“The pleasure for me is in the creative process,” she says.

There is something almost radical in hearing a woman in her seventies defend play so plainly. Children, Baruffi thinks, often understand her work more readily than adults do. They recognize the joke. They understand that a bird can appear somewhere a bird has no practical reason to be, that an old painting can tolerate an interruption, that a Barbie doll can become material, and that the rules governing an object are considerably more flexible than adults have been led to believe.

Her own sons have occasionally disagreed.

Years ago, on her way to the grocery store, Baruffi encountered some little girls selling Barbie dolls in a bag. The dolls were naked. She bought them anyway, arranged them in a box and eventually added a sheer chiffon scarf after her college-age sons objected to the display.

“Just take it upstairs,” they told her.

Someone else loved it.

The piece sold.

“Rescue Art”

Baruffi has a phrase for some of the paintings and drawings she brings home: rescue art.

These are rarely works carrying famous signatures or obvious monetary value. They are the paintings that appear in basements and garages, sometimes damaged, sometimes amateur, sometimes sitting in houses with dumpsters already parked outside because the building itself is headed for demolition.

She may cut into them. She may work around damaged sections. She may combine them with other materials. Yet she finds herself thinking about the anonymous person who made them.

“I do find myself imagining the hours someone dedicated to making it,” she told me. “I wonder how many Sundays or winter days it must have taken.”

The archivist has apparently never entirely retired.

Baruffi spent her professional career as a researcher and archivist, a wonderfully serious résumé for someone who now speaks with great enthusiasm about rusty farm hardware arriving from the Dakotas. When I later asked whether she saw a connection between those two lives, she identified one immediately.

Curiosity.

“I am intensely interested in back stories,” she said, “the things that shape our world, from history and current events to the quotidian life of ordinary people.”

That word, quotidian, may explain much of what happens inside this house.

Baruffi is interested in ordinary life after ordinary life has moved on.

An old wooden toolbox fascinates her partly because somebody made it. Before the red metal toolboxes that became familiar fixtures in garages, a carpenter might construct his own. The handle matters. The wear matters. The fact that a human being once needed a box and solved the problem by building one matters.

A handmade frame rescued from a garage receives the same consideration. Someone worked hard on it, she reasoned, so she repaired the broken sections rather than allowing it to disappear.

“I have great respect for things,” she told me. “A lot of this stuff, people made it.”

There is an irony embedded in all this preservation: Baruffi cheerfully cuts things apart.

A violin has been supplying material for years. Paintings become backgrounds. A Christmas decoration loses its clip. An object can be respected without remaining intact. In Baruffi’s world, preservation can involve allowing something to become something else.

Her hunting grounds are often Bergen County estate sales, partly because they are productive and partly because she has imposed a practical geographic rule upon herself.

She doesn’t like driving more than fifteen minutes to a sale.

“I have great respect for things. A lot of this stuff, people made it.”

Tenafly and Westwood have been particularly useful. In one Tenafly house, she encountered the belongings of someone who appeared to have been interested in art and framing. Elsewhere, she has found forgotten craft supplies, old paintings and the kinds of knickknacks that accumulate quietly over decades.

Sometimes the people running the sales watch her selections with concern.

“What is she going to do with it?” she imagines them wondering.

Her answer is generally reassuring: she dabbles in “little experimental art things.”

This description considerably understates the situation.

The Things We Leave Behind

For someone who spends so much time rescuing other people’s belongings, Baruffi is strikingly unsentimental about what may eventually happen to her own.

Her children, she predicts, will throw things into a dumpster.

This possibility has begun to create some urgency. She would like to “put it out there,” she says, and let people see the work, perhaps take a piece or two home. She has shown pieces occasionally, including at the Piermont Library, and sold two works on the day we first met. She was delighted by that, particularly by the validation of hearing what people responded to.

She has yet to build a website or seriously pursue the machinery of selling art.

Shipping holds little romance for her.

Making does.

“The pleasure for me is in the creative process.”

There is a wonderful circularity to this predicament. Baruffi has built an artistic practice from the physical remnants of lives that came before hers. She enters houses after their owners have died or moved away. She finds the abandoned project, the homemade box, the Sunday painting, the ceramic experiment whose purpose the surviving niece cannot explain. She takes these things home because somebody made them and because, for reasons she cannot always articulate, she believes they deserve to continue.

Now her own house is filling with the next generation of mysterious objects.

Someday, somebody may stand in front of one and wonder what on earth Kathy Baruffi was thinking.

That seems entirely appropriate.

When Play Gets Serious

Walking through Baruffi’s house, it is easy to become absorbed in the wit of the work. Then she shows you the suitcases.

For years, she has also made assemblages about the housing crisis.

One incorporates a suitcase with the suggestion of a house, evoking the increasingly literal reality of living out of one. Another used Monopoly houses to suggest how unreachable housing has become. There are several pieces in the series, although Baruffi sometimes has to search the house to remember exactly where they are.

The subject changes her tone.

“It’s heartbreaking to see how many people, young and old, are currently struggling to afford housing,” she told me afterward.

She began making assemblages about the issue because she hoped art could help draw attention to it. She photographed the works and sent the images to housing activist groups, offering them free of charge for use in their advocacy.

Nobody replied.

Baruffi has a generous interpretation of the silence. Perhaps, she reasons, people working directly on the crisis are so beleaguered that considering how art might contribute to the cause feels like a luxury.

The offer remains open.

“I will gladly share them with anyone who can use them.”

“It’s heartbreaking to see how many people, young and old, are currently struggling to afford housing.”

The housing pieces reveal something important about the rest of the work. The old boxes and paintings and bits of hardware are playful, although they are never entirely empty of meaning. Objects carry evidence of how people lived: what they could afford, what they repaired, what they made themselves, what they kept in the basement because it might someday be useful.

An archivist would notice that.

So would an artist.

Baruffi happens to be both.

Before I left, I asked Baruffi what she would want if I arrived at her door with one completely ordinary object from my own house and told her she had to make something from it.

Something colorful, she said. A delicate ceramic bird would be good. Vintage fabric. Patterned paper.

And what should I leave at home?

Modern things.

Familiarity, she explained, usually has less surprise in it.

This seems like an excellent rule for understanding Baruffi’s house. Surprise is everywhere because almost nothing has been allowed to remain merely what it was.

A piece of wood once belonged to someone’s workshop. A painting consumed somebody’s winter Sundays. A ceramic ball was made by a woman with a kiln whose niece no longer knows why she made it. A violin keeps losing pieces. A naked Barbie gets a chiffon scarf. A carpenter’s box outlives the carpenter.

And somewhere in a Bergen County basement, an object is sitting on a table waiting for everyone else to decide that it has reached the end of its useful life.

Kathy Baruffi might disagree.