Because the artist Inge Hardison created towering statues and small busts of schoolchildren, families and heroes like Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., she was often described as the lady who builds giants. What apparently did not interest Ms. Hardison, who died in March at 102, were practical matters like organizing papers.

“She danced in the flowers, she called herself a sunbeam,” her daughter, Yolande Hardison, said during a tour of the family home on Central Park West. Clay and plaster heads and torsos, tinted to resemble bronze, are displayed in glass cases and tucked in corners.

The art dealer Michael Rosenfeld, who has long specialized in African-American artists, recently toured the apartment. “It’s an amazing time capsule,” he said. Too often, he added, artists’ archives “get tossed in the trash.”

Yolande Hardison is struggling to sift through her mother’s jumbled archives and stacks of diaries bound in blue fabric. “I’m still finding out things I didn’t know,” she said, adding that her mother, not quite five feet tall, was “a little dynamo.”