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Gwendolyn Knight Gwendolyn Knight (1913 – 2005) A painter of portraits, dance figures, and landscapes and a sculptor, Gwendolyn Knight was born in Bridgetown, Barbados in 1913. Late in her life, she also drew and painted numerous horses and cats, "quick, lyrical sketches rendered as etchings and monoprints." Her father died when she was age two, and in 1920, she traveled to St. Louis with a foster family and then moved on to New York City when she was thirteen. She graduated in 1930 from Wadleigh High School for Girls, an integrated school in Harlem and then studied for two years at the Howard University School of Fine Arts. She dropped her classes because of the Depression, and sculptor Augusta Savage arranged for her to have income as an artist for the Works Progress Administration. Gwendolyn Knight took classes at the Harlem Community Art Center, and there met and later married Jacob Lawrence, who became a famous African-American Artist. The couple lived in Nigeria, which had much influence on her art. In 1971, they moved to Seattle, Washington where Jacob Lawrence taught at the University of Washington School of Art. Her husband died in 2000. She treated her career as secondary to his and told a reporter: "It wasn't necessary for me to have acclaim. I just knew that I wanted to do it, so I did it whenever I could." Her first retrospective was held in 2003 at the Tacoma Art Museum.   click to begin slide show