Gwendolyn Knight, 91, Artist Who Blossomed Late in Life, Dies
NY Times
Gwendolyn Knight, a painter and sculptor from the 1930’s who emerged from the shadow of her husband, the painter Jacob Lawrence, late in her life, died on Feb. 18 at her home in Seattle. She was 91.
Although Ms. Knight did not begin to exhibit formally until the 1970’s and was long known as the wife of Mr. Lawrence, a leading visual chronicler of the African-American experience, she began painting when she was young and was still setting out in new directions in old age.
This was evident in her first retrospective, titled “Never Late for Heaven: The Art of Gwen Knight,” at the Tacoma Art Museum in 2003. Having devoted most of her career to oil portraits of friends, figure studies of dancers, and watercolor and gouache landscapes that seemed to be companion pieces to her husband’s work, she suddenly began in the 1990’s to draw horses and cats from memory - quick, lyrical sketches rendered as etchings and monoprints.
“It wasn’t necessary for me to have acclaim,” she told Charles H. Rowell in an interview for Callaloo magazine in 1988. “I just knew that I wanted to do it, so I did it whenever I could.”
width="120"
height="240"
scrolling="no"
marginwidth="0"
marginheight="0"
frameborder="0">
width="120"
height="240"
scrolling="no"
marginwidth="0"
marginheight="0"
frameborder="0">
