Karla Knight

Born 1958, New York, NY.

EDUCATION

1980 Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI, BFA Painting 1980 RISD European Honors Program, Rome, Italy

SOLO EXHIBITIONS/THREE-PERSON EXHIBITIONS*

2020 Notes from the Light Ship, Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York, NY

2018 Spaceship Drawings, EBK Gallery, Hartford, CT

2010 Life in Space: Charcoal Drawings, Artspace, New Haven, CT

2004 Pondering the Marvelous, Wave Hill Glyndor Gallery, Bronx, NY*

1990 Lorence-Monk Gallery, New York, NY

1987 Lorence-Monk Gallery, New York, NY

1986 Dart Gallery, Chicago, IL

1981 William Francis Gallery, Providence, RI

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2019 Summer Exhibition: Recent Works, Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York, NY

2018 April 14, 1561, Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York, NY 21st Century Cyphers, 516 Arts, Albuquerque, NM

2017 Underlying system is not known, Western Exhibitions, Chicago, IL Rhyme & Reason, Connecticut Commission on Culture & Tourism Gallery, Hartford, CT

2016 Intuitive Progression, Fisher Landau Center for Art, Long Island City, NY Magic, curated by Tiffany Calvert, Mercer County Community College, NJ

2015 Digging: A Group Show, curated by Becky Kindder, Brooklyn Open Studios, Brooklyn, NY

2014 Momenta Art Benefit, Brooklyn, NY

2012 Diagram, Real Art Ways, Hartford, CT Momenta Art Benefit, Brooklyn, NY Nurture Art Benefit, Brooklyn, NY

2011 Drawing and Illustration, Maslow Study Gallery for Contemporary Art, Marywood University, Scranton, PA

2010 All Things Being Equal, curated by Tiffany Calvert, Raritan Valley Community College, Bridgewater, NJ Power to the People, Feature, Inc., New York, NY

2009 FIVE DECADES OF PASSION Part Two: The Founding of the Center, 1989-1991, Fisher Landau Center for Art, Long Island City, NY White Columns, New York. Work instated in Curated Artist Registry. Contemporary Women Artists: Work on Paper, Maslow Study Gallery for Contemporary Art, Marywood University, Scranton, PA

2008 Pierogi Flatfiles, New York, NY Desire, Art Forum Berlin, Berlin, Germany Worlds Away, Connecticut Commission on Culture & Tourism Gallery, Hartford, CT

2007 Paper, Fisher Landau Center for Art, Long Island City, NY Pierogi Flatfiles, New York, NY Artnews Projects, Berlin, DE

2006 Pierogi Flatfiles, New York, NY Statements and Symbols: Selected Paintings and Prints from the Maslow Collection, Marywood University Suraci Gallery, Scranton, PA

2002 40 by 40, Adam Baumgold Gallery, New York

2001 Double Visions, Adam Baumgold Gallery, New York

2000 Quirky, Adam Baumgold Gallery, New York Ambiguity: Layers of Information, Contemporary Gallery, Marywood University, Scranton, PA

1998 Imaginary Friend, curated by Nayland Blake, Rupert Goldsworthy Gallery, New York, NY

1997 Invitational, Adam Baumgold Gallery, New York, NY

1995 Selections, Adam Baumgold Gallery, New York, NY

1993 The Return of the Cadavre Exquis, Drawing Center, New York, NY

1991 New Works on Paper, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY

1990 Art Against AIDS, Washington, DC Lorence-Monk Gallery, New York, NY

1989 Group Show, Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MA Fawbush Gallery, New York, NY

1988 Works on Paper, Curt Marcus Gallery, New York, NY Dart Gallery, Chicago, IL The Power of Drawings, Center for Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL

1987 Group Painting Exhibition, Lorence-Monk Gallery, New York, NY Art Against AIDS, Lorence-Monk Gallery, New York, NY

1986 Painting the Object, Lorence-Monk Gallery, New York, NY

1985 Real Surreal, Lorence-Monk Gallery, New York, NY

1980 European Honors Thesis Show, RISD, Palazzo-Cenci, Rome, Italy

Two-person exhibition, Woods-Gerry Gallery, Providence, RI

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

2019 Smith, Roberta. "What to See in New York Art Galleries This Week," The New York Times, January 9.

2018 Halle, Howard. "April 14, 1561," Time Out New York, December 17. Photo repro. Halle, Howard. "The Top five New York art shows this week," Time Out New York, December 17. Photo repro. Roberts, Kathaleen. "21st Century Cyphers," Albuquerque Journal, May 13. Photo repro. Dunne, Susan. "Karla Knight's Spaceship Drawings at EBK in Hartford," Hartford Courant, June 16. Photo repro.

2016 TimesLedger, "Intuitive Progression," Steve Barnes, August 25

2014 Post Road Magazine, Issue 26, "Ground Control."

2012 The Hartford Courant, "Diagram at Real Art Ways," Susan Dunne, Nov. 14 Samelson, Henry. Buddy of Work, blog. February 19, 2012.

2010 New Haven Advocate, "Knowing and Forgetting," Geoffrey Detrani, April 5

2004 The New York Times, “You and Them!” October 31, Arts and Leisure Wave Hill News, Autumn 200 The Riverdale Press, “Natural Notions,” September 23

1991 Brooklyn Museum Newsletter, Summer 1991

1989 Dorsey, John. "Works by Emerging Artists," Baltimore Sun, February 1989

1988 Cohrs, Timothy. “Karla Knight,” Arts, January

1987 Cameron, Dan. "Opening Salvos, Part One," Arts, December

1986 Cohrs, Timothy. “Group Show,” Arts, February Bomb, Spring 1986, pp. 32, 33. Photo repro. Saltz, Jerry. Beyond Boundaries, New York’s New Art, Alfred van der Marck Editions

COLLECTIONS

The , New York, NY The Brooklyn Museum, NY Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN Emily Fisher Landau, Long Island City, NY Maslow Collection, Scranton, PA Chase Bank, New York, NY Prudential, Inc., Newark, NJ Tamayo Museum, Mexico City, MX Hart-Abrams, Inc. McCrory Corporation Middlebury College Museum of Art, Middlebury, VT

AWARDS/FELLOWSHIPS/RESIDENCIES

2018 Yaddo Corporation, Saratoga Springs, NY: Artist Residency

2016 Yaddo Corporation, Saratoga Springs, NY: Artist Residency

2015 Connecticut Office of the Arts: Artist Fellowship

2014 The MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, NH: Fellowship

2012 Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant: Nominee

2006 Connecticut Office of the Arts: Artist Fellowship

What to See in New York Art Galleries This Week

by Roberta Smith

Through Jan. 20. Andrew Edlin Gallery, 212 , Manhattan; 212-206-9723, edlingallery.com.

Ionel Talpazan's “Spiritual Technology — Special Design,” 2003, mixed media on paper.

The title of this engaging four-artist show at Andrew Edlin — “April 14, 1561” — is the date of one of the earliest reported mass sightings of possible U.F.O. activity above Nuremberg, Germany. As might be expected alien spacecraft figure, or seem to, in every work on view. And all the artists had, or have, reasons to believe.

Ionel Talpazan (1955-2015) claimed that when he was a child in Romania, a U.F.O. flew near him, enveloping him in a blue light. He devoted the rest of his life, half of it spent in , to rendering brightly colored spaceships whose revealed interior structures make them resemble elaborately cut gems. Similarly Paulina Peavy (1901-1999), a West Coast artist who encountered a spirit she called Lacamo when she was 31, ascribed all her subsequent, extremely varied artworks to the directions of this spirit muse. The abstractions

representing Ms. Peavy here suggest brightly colored embryos or sleek flying saucers drifting among amniotic fluids or intergalactic ethers.

The remaining two artists were subject to parental influence. The father of Karla Knight (born 1958) wrote about U.F.O.s and ESP: Her large beautifully textured drawings in graphite and colored pencil resemble mysterious codes and alphabets— or a spaceship’s complex control panel. Finally Esther Pearl Watson (born 1973), whose father devoted a great deal of energy trying to build a working flying saucer, bases her small detailed panel paintings on family experiences. They show space modules bolted together from gleaming panels (aluminum foil, actually) hovering above longhorn cattle, police cars and rolling fields, or occasionally touching down.

Depicted in a style best described as New Age Grandma Moses, the images have captions like “NASA doesn’t seem to understand this” or “There’s a magnetic field collaps (sic), and we’re out of milk.” Ms. Watson excels at night skies. In “You Are Welcome to Visit (Us Anytime You Want),” clouds line up like a legion of dirigibles to greet a visiting U.F.O. Art, Contemporary art Andrew Edlin Gallery, Until Saturday January 19 2019 4 out of 5 stars

“April 14, 1561”

This show’s title marks the date when swarms of spheres invaded the skies above 16th-century Nuremberg, Germany, suggesting that UFO visitations have been with us since time immemorial. Indeed, if you believe the so-called “ancient astronaut theorists” on the History Channel, extraterrestrials have regularly descended on our planet over the centuries to erect the marvels—Khufu’s Pyramid, Machu Picchu and so on—that we were apparently too stupid to build ourselves. That may be the case (at least the part about mankind being stupid), but if nothing else, tales of otherworldly intrusions, including abductions by little gray men wielding anal probes, represent a kind of redemption narrative in saucer form. That background informs this lively exhibition of four artists—Ionel Talpazan, Karla Knight, Paulina Peavy and Esther Pearl Watson—whose works relay close encounters of varying kinds. Ionel Talpazan (1955–2015) was an eight-year-old in rural Romania when he snuck out his bedroom window in the middle of the night and ran into a UFO that transfixed him with “radiating blue energy,” as he later claimed. The incident inspired a fascination with alien technology, which Talpazan detailed in scores of colorful spaceship schematics, annotated in Romanian. One example, Silver UFO, depicts a flying hubcap whose center dome oddly recalls the U.S. Capitol.

Talpazan was self-taught, but the other artists, like Esther Pearl Watson, went to art school. Her scenes of funky spacecraft hovering over recycling centers or pastures dotted with indifferent cows illustrate episodes in the life of her father, a man who spent years struggling to build a working flying saucer that he had hoped to sell to NASA. Similarly, Karla Knight draws upon a childhood populated by eccentric relatives, including a dad who wrote obsessively about UFOs. Like Talpazan, she creates spaceship diagrams, though they resemble glyphs left behind by galactic travelers. Small, abstract canvases by Paulina Peavy (1901– 1999) may seem out of place, but their softly gradated, ovoid shapes were guided by an extraterrestrial “spirit muse” that revealed itself to her during a séance.

Ultimately, it’s easy to dismiss UFO encounters as fantasy, but they’re real enough for the people who have them, perhaps reflecting an underlying need to seek out the divine. You could say the works here share a certain religiosity or maybe a recognition of something Carl Sagan once said about us as a species: We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.

BY: HOWARD HALLE

POSTED: MONDAY DECEMBER 17 2018

Karla Knight's 'Spaceship Drawings' At EBK In Hartford

By SUSAN DUNNE | [email protected] |JUN 16, 2018 | 6:00 AM

Karla Knight's lifelong interest in UFOs and her son learning how to read inspired her "spaceship" drawings. (Courtesy EBK Gallery)

Karla Knight’s pencil-on-paper drawings, which she calls “spaceships,” look like schematic diagrams scattered with letters not from any human alphabet but from an alphabet beyond Earthly understanding. Knight, of Redding, wants them to stay beyond our understanding. “People ask me if there is a key. They are missing the point. It’s not about deciphering them. It’s about living with the unknown of them,” Knight said. “It can be uncomfortable living with the unknown.”

An exhibit of Knight’s drawings are up now at EBK Gallery [small works] in Hartford. Karla Knight sees her own language in her dreams. (Courtesy EBK Gallery)

The idea for her spaceships goes back to childhood. “Half of my family was really into weird stuff, séances and Ouija boards. My father was a writer and wrote about UFOs and ESP,” she said.

Karla Knight doesn't want to explain what her drawings mean. "I'm much happier when I don't," she said, (Courtesy EBK Gallery)

Then decades ago, when her son was learning to read, an idea came to her. “Kids transpose letters and make weird symbols. I thought I’d try it, too. I started my own language,” she said. “I don’t know where it came from or if it means anything. I can’t explain it.”

Knight draws on old journal or ledger paper, to give her creations a sense of age, and sometimes collages them from different sources. She said she doesn’t pre-plan how the drawings will look. “They look like diagrams. That’s just how they come out,” she said. “Of course it comes from the unconscious.”

Now Knight’s made-up language is a part of her. “A couple years ago I started to dream in the language. It was very cool. It got so much into my subconscious that it just started to flow out,” Knight said.

Karla Knight considers her language "ancient and futuristic at the same time." (Courtesy EBK Gallery)

------...... "", New Works on Paper Brooklyn Museum Newsletter, Summer 1991 lul11 Exhibited Ihe GOs An installation of eight recent acquisitions by the Prints and Drawings Department is on view in for jal the department's East Gallery through late ~hiff August. This small selection samples the kind of Ie pi! works on paper that have been acquired during lummi the past decade in an effort to keep a strong l8fIIer representation of twentieth-century art current. wundl A growing collection of monotypes is This represented by a luminous and mysterious work ~rts, from 1990 by the American artist Nancy Haynes. I~ace A 1982 etching, Man at Window, by the contem- 1~I·cC porary German Expressionist Georg Baselitz is For an example of a modern approach to the at- ~hedl titudes found in the department's excellent holdings of earlier twentieth-century German Ex- pressionist prints, while a silkscreen of 1990 by the Conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth is a reminder of his recent installation in the Cal Museum's Grand Lobby. An aspect of the department's collecting direc- lis a tions has been focused on drawings by BlOok sculptors. Thus a large Minimalist charcoal draw- ~enll ing by the American sculptor Jene Highstein is Ivery juxtaposed with an expressive gestural head by ments the Polish sculptor Magdalena Abakanowicz, /b de both revealing additional information on the Ilquir aesthetic concerns of the artists. md IT A collage with minimal forms and textured, ex- My P pressive drawing by the young American Carole ~cile Seborovski has a counterpart in a large 1981 runch drawing entitled Shelter by the Israeli artist Micha Volun Ullman. On the other hand, a precisely drawn Thurs and constructed charcoal drawing of 1988 by ffilurr Karla Knight recalls Cubist structure with forms that are at once mechanical and anthropo- morphic. The larger gallery of the Prints and Drawings Department on the second floor is now closed because of the renovation of the Museum's West Wing. Visitors who wish to see specific works in - the collection for purposes of research or pleasure are welcome to call the department for an appointment. Karla Knight (American, b. 1958). Untitled, 1988. Charcoal on paper, 32% x 24 inches. The Brooklyn Museum 1989.168, Gift of Susan lorence. = In Memoriam: Edith Lowenthal

The Museum Trustees and staff record with sor- Edith and Milton Lowenthal's deep commit· row the death on May 2 of Edith Lowenthal, a ment to American art compelled them to share longtime friend and a Trustee who, with her late their vision with others by enriching the perma- husband, Milton, formed one of the most nent collections of The Brooklyn Museum. They distinguished private collections of American were aiso founders of The Roebling Society, painting and sculpture of the 1930s and 1940s. whose members have supported the growth of In 1981 The Brooklyn Museum organized The the Museum's collections with an annual gift d Edith and Milton Lowenthal Collection, a special since 1968. Since 1984, Edith Lowenthal serve exhibition of this extraordinary collection of sixty- faithfUlly on the Board of Trustees, where she seven paintings, sculptures, and works on paper. was a member of the Acquisitions Committee. The Lowenthals, inspired in the early 1940s by She was also a member of the American Art their discovery of contemporary American art, Council and the Oriental Art Council. directed their remarkable energies to the support of American art and artists, not only through their acquisition of great paintings and sculptures 1932-35. but also through their generosity of spirit in plac- Stuart Davis (American, 1894-1964). Landscape, seum Oil on canvas, 32V2 x 29V4 inches. The Brooklyn Mu ing many of these works in public collections. 73.150, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Milton Lowenthal. Among the Lowenthals' generous gifts to The Brooklyn Museum are Stuart Davis's highly im- portant early abstraction Landscape of 1932-35, Marsden Hartley's cubist masterwork Handsome Drinks of 1916, and Hartley's powerful painting The Last Look of John Donne of 1940. All are currently on view in the fifth-floor American Galleries. \