Jennie Lea Knight was born in
Washington, D.C., where she received her art training. She began her studies in
design and music at the King-Smith School of Creative Arts and in 1951
graduated from the Institute of Contemporary Arts, where she studied painting
with Ken Noland. She attended American University, studying with Robert Gates
and William Calfee, and later became an instructor there. She was an instructor
and lecturer at the Corcoran School, the Art League School and George Mason
University.
During the early 1950s Knight became
increasingly interested in three-dimensional media, and by 1964 was
concentrating entirely on sculpture. In 1956, she co-founded Studio Gallery on
King Street in Alexandria. She directed the art gallery, one of the first in
Northern Virginia, for about 10 years and then gave it up to the participating
artists, who turned it into the city's first cooperative. During the summers of
1964 and 1965 Knight worked in the bronze foundry of the Penland School, where
she cast and finished her own pieces using the lost-wax method. The following
year she worked in the Fonderia Battaglia in Milan, devoting further study to
casting techniques. In 1972, she was chief of installation of the American
Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
After progressively debilitating
fibromyalgia and several bouts of cancer hampered her physically demanding
large-scale art, she began carving small, intimate sculptures by hand. The miniature
but powerful sculptures were shown at American University's Watkins Gallery in
2004, in her last show.
