12th Street Series: Never Late for Heaven: The Art of Gwendolyn Knight

January 14 – May 3, 2003

An expressionistic painter with a strong interest in people, Gwendolyn Knight has developed a fluid sense of design using a brilliant palette of bright greens, reds and blues over the past seventy years. As an artist on one of the federal government’s Depression-era public art projects, Knight met her husband Jacob Lawrence in 1937. They lived in New York City until 1970 when they moved to Seattle. Each maintained their own artistic style, while their humanist interests created a strong intellectual bond. For most of her career Knight painted people who posed for her at home or in various studio settings and recreated scenes from the various neighborhoods in which she lived. More recently, Knight engaged printmaking. A number of her etchings and silkscreens, some of which reinterpret earlier paintings, were included in the exhibition. A fully-illustrated catalogue published by University of Washington Press accompanied the exhibition.