Never Late for Heaven chronicles an odyssey in American art and social events beginning with the often-romanticized Harlem Renaissance and traveling through the Great Depression and beyond. Gwen Knight’s story reveals the life and the passion for painting of a young woman who was surrounded and supported by her community. Her formal education cut short by the Depression, Knight left Howard University and returned to Harlem, where her real art education began. For several years she participated in WPA apprenticeships and workshops, guided by her own independent mind and spirit. She and her fellow painters, including Jacob Lawrence (whom she later married), immersed themselves in a world that was creating its own narrative in history, literature, music, and theater. As New York was a mecca for artists of all stripes, Harlem was a singular world within that mecca. Knight recalls that everything was alive; that she lived so rigorously in the present that there was no thought about the future. Knight and Lawrence moved to Seattle in 1971, when Jacob accepted a teaching post in the art school at the University of Washington. Knight’s paintings, spanning more than sixty years in New York and Seattle, demonstrate one artist’s determination to make art. There was no career path or external motivation to drive her, only a belief that making art was a way of life. The skillful, intellectual, and emotionally sensitive works in this book pull the viewer into a world that is both controlled and fluid. Never Late for Heaven shows a painter whose long life and good fortune have delivered her to us, with her art work, right on time. Never Late for Heaven accompanied a 2003 exhibit at the Tacoma Art Museum featuring paintings from the Francine Seders Gallery in Seattle.

Never Late for Heaven

Arts & Photography

Conkelton, Sheryl

Thomas, Barbara Earl

History & Criticism

University of Washington Press

Published in conjunction with a 2003 exhibition organized by the Tacoma Art Museum, this catalog offers two extensive essays by curators Conkelton and Landau, who draw on letters, interviews, and new analyses of the artists' works to investigate how these "mystic painters of the Northwest" influenced one another. The four painters were friends and colleagues for only a few years around the time of World War II, and their styles are entirely individual and distinctive; yet they are linked by their association with the Pacific Northwest and by underlying philosophical interests. A section of plates is followed by a timeline, exhibition checklist, and bibliography. Slightly oversize: 9.5x11.25

Northwest Mythologies: The Interactions of Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Kenneth Callahan, and Guy Anderson

Landau, Laura

Tacoma Art Museum

Univ of Washington Pr

Book by Conkelton, Sheryl, Eliel, Carol S.

Annette Messager: A Museum of Modern Art Book

Eliel, Carol S.

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Harry N.Abrams, Inc.

In the photographs in 'Home and Other Stories, ' Catherine Wagner takes these precepts as her starting point. Each three-part work shows various aspects of one American home: rooms or potions of rooms and objects in ensembles that are carefully arranged for visitors or carelessly disposed in privacy.

Home and Other Stories

Wagner, Catherine

Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Photography & Video

Univ of New Mexico Pr

Home and Other Stories: Photographs by Catherine Wagner

Rising star Uta Barth is one of the most exciting and innovative artist/photographers in the world today-her enigmatic and beguiling images have again and again transfixed art audiences from London to Los Angeles. Barth's work draws its strength from its blurring of the familiar and strange, bringing the viewer to a liminal space between the two. It is in this space that Barth begins her investigation into the very nature of perception, where the epistemological importance of such formal qualities as lighting and composition becomes astoundingly evident. Uta Barth: In Between Spaces is the first comprehensive book on Barth's oeuvre, presenting a carefully selected survey of her works, and as such is a must-have for viewers, collectors and students attracted to contemporary art and photography. The poetic resonance, radical intelligence and sheer beauty of Barth's pictures are given perfect illustration in this book, designed with the artist herself. Uta Barth's work is represented in numerous public and private collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the Tate Gallery, London; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. She has had solo exhibitions in Los Angeles, New York, London, San Francisco, and Stockholm.

Uta Barth In Between Places

Barth, Uta

Russell Ferguson

Timothy Martin

Individual Artists

Henry Art Gallery

What It Meant to Be Modern looks at the ways in which the work of artists in Seattle from 1932 to 1962 was intricately intertwined with the city and explores the diverse styles that arose from a complex and wide-ranging set of ideas about modern art. Well-known Northwest artists such as Mark Tobey, Kenneth Callahan, Leo Kenney, and Margaret Tomkins came to the fore in this period and influenced younger artists such as George Tsutakawa, Glen Alps, Paul Horiuchi, and Helmi Juvonen.
 Essays present modern art in the context of Seattle's social and physical growth as a regional center, and reconsider the influence of European and American modernist movements, the appeal of certain Asian styles and methods, and the rigorous involvement with technique and craft that developed in the postwar period.

What It Meant to Be Modern: Seattle Art at Mid-Century

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Books by Conkelton, Sheryl