Lawrence and Knight met at the studio of artist Charles Alston where Knight was employed by the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Before working with Alston, Knight attended Howard University, until the Great Depression forced her to leave after two years. She then studied painting and sculpture under the tutelage of Augusta Savage at the Savage School of Arts and Crafts in Harlem, and it was through Savage’s guidance and encouragement she was employed by the WPA. When Lawrence and Knight first met, Knight, being four years older, was the more traveled and worldlier of the two, while Lawrence was just sixteen. Within several years, Lawrence was deemed a prodigy in the art world, creating bold and searing depictions of life in Harlem and by 1938 he completed his first historical narrative series, The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture. Lawrence’s earliest work included in this exhibition, Pool Players (1938), depicts figures in a billiard hall, expressing the liveliness and camaraderie that Lawrence found in the neighborhood of Harlem, despite the ongoing upheaval caused by the Great Depression.

The years following World War II were busy for both Lawrence and Knight. In 1946, they were invited by Josef Albers to travel to Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Lawrence taught art classes at the college, the first of many teaching posts he would take, while Knight, who had studied dance with Martha Graham, taught informal dance lessons and attended classes. During this summer in North Carolina, Lawrence and Knight remained on campus, shielded from the pervasive racism and laws of segregation. In 1947, Walker Evans, then an editor at Fortune Magazine, commissioned Lawrence to create a series of paintings depicting the lives of Black Americans in the southern “Black Belt.” Traveling to Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and Tennessee, Lawrence recorded postwar conditions in the rural south witnessing the economic disparities amongst the wealthy and poor Black communities. One of the ten paintings completed in this series, Beer Hall (1947), is a powerful statement of rural black life that melds the representational and the abstract in a depiction of laborers coming together, some dressed in suits, others overalls. A sense of the daily struggle and the harsh reality of racism pervades the scene, reinforced by the looming presence of the single white police officer in the upper right corner of the scene, sitting apart from the crowds. Uniformed and armed, he leisurely smokes his pipe and surveils the bar’s patrons.

Overall, the decade of the 1940s was one of significant artistic and professional growth for Lawrence. He established a successful relationship with the Downtown Gallery in New York City, exhibited frequently, and received wide recognition and critical acclaim for his work. Lawrence voluntarily entered the Hillside Hospital in Queens in 1949 as a psychiatric patient, the mounting pressures and accumulated stress of his new-found fame resulted in severe depression, where he would remain for almost a year. Lawrence’s paintings following his hospitalization are characterized by a more introspective approach, reflecting the personal insights he gained during this time. Solitaire (1950) was completed shortly after he left the hospital, evoking a dual reference through its title and subject to the card game and the man playing alone.

Their compositions reveal how she experimented with sharper abstraction, energetic lines and color, though her love of portraiture continues to be evidenced by these prints. Gwen Knight was the subject of the retrospective exhibition Never Late for Heaven: The Art of Gwen Knight, organized by the Tacoma Art Museum in Washington in 2003, that was accompanied by a monograph with the same title. Her work has been included in recent traveling exhibitions alongside that of Jacob Lawrence, including Between Form and Content: Perspectives on Jacob Lawrence and Black Mountain College, exhibited from 2018 to 2019.