Never Too Late For Heaven: The Art Of Gwen Knight

Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003. Hardcover. VG+ (light bumping & creasing to a few years. dustjacket has rubbing to spine top; light scratches & scuffs. remains tightly bound.). Teal boards; teal/rose dj with color image; white lettering on spine. Dj in Mylar cover. 83 pp. full of color and bw illustrations. Photo is of a copy from our previous collection; this copy is NOT ex-library. This a very nice, sharp and bright copy. "Chronicles the odyssey in American art and social events beginning with the Harlem Renaissance and traveling through the Great Depressiona nd beyond. Published to coincide with Knight's first-ever retrospective, in 2003 when she was 89, held at the Tacoma Art Museum. She was a painter and sculptor who did not begin to exhibit formally until the 1970's and was long known as the wife of Jacob 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. 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.'' (information partially from the NY Times).