Description
‘Eye’, fiber wall sculpture, comprised of 21 wrapped jute elements by fiber artist Jane Knight 1928-2013. Signed with copper tag. Acquired directly from the private collection of the Knight family and the estate of Jane Knight.*
Jane Knight (1928-2013) was born in Grosse Pointe and received her BFA from the University of Michigan in 1951. After graduation, she worked as the Art Director for the Detroit based luxury department store JL Hudsons and designed for the Cranbrook Theater School. Due to her husband’s employment at Eero Saarinen and Associates she was embraced by a community of cutting-edge designers and architects at the epicenter of the modernism movement and was personal friends of Eero Saarinen, Charles and Ray Eames, Alexander Girard and George Nelson, to name a few.
Jane was an avid traveler who always viewed the world magically with her creative eye. As an art collector herself, she highly regarded the work of Alexander Calder and Henri Matisse. Throughout her career, she created numerous freestanding, wall mounted, and suspended fiber art sculptures for countless interior environments. Her artwork has been featured in books of fiber design, exhibited in galleries in San Francisco, Chicago and New York and is included in several corporate collections including Borge Warner and Chrysler.
Jane’s body of work is a product of her perpetual need to create art and a constant conviction that one’s home should be a continual environmental stimulus. Her wall hangings, which are considered to be her most important works, are comprised of brightly colored woolen strands encapsulating heavy lengths of jute fibers. These captivating works of art epitomize the vibrancy and textural exuberance that was so characteristic of the fiber art movement throughout the 1960s and 70s.
* Many of these three-dimensional textile works were recently discovered in storage and have not been displayed since they were originally presented at the San Francisco Galleria Design Center Exposition “Art Fabric ’77: The Contemporary American Tapestry”. Other important pieces available.
Much like her contemporaries Sheila Hicks and Olga de Amaral, Jane Knight was one of the few female artists of this important era who was able to push the boundaries of a medium, usually considered to be a craft, into the realm of fine art.
1975
H 39.5 in. x W 49 in. x D 1 in.9
