Gwendolyn Knight

Who was Gwendolyn Knight?

Gwendolyn Clarine Knight was an American artist who was born in Bridgetown, Barbados in the West Indies.

Knight painted throughout her life, but did not start seriously exhibiting her work until the 1970s. Her first retrospective when she was nearly eighty years old. Her teachers in the arts included the sculptor Augusta Savage and Jacob Lawrence, whom she married in 1941 and remained married to until his death in 2000. During the course of her career, she received many awards including the National Honor Award, and two honorary doctorate degrees.

With her husband, Knight founded the Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation in 2000, initially to support the careers of professional artists early in their careers. When Lawrence died, Knight disbanded the original foundation and changed her will so that most of the couple's assets went to support children's programs. Today the Foundation's activities are devoted to the maintenance of a website that had been developed in 2000. The U.S. copyright representative for the Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation is the Artists Rights Society.