The Artwork of Avel de Knight
Avel C. de Knight was a Paris and New York-based artist, educator, curator, and art critic. Born in New York City in April of 1923, he was the son of parents who immigrated to the United States from Barbados and Puerto Rico. De Knight studied at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn from 1942 to 1943, after which he served in the Army, in a segregated unit, until the end of World War II.
After the war and with the aid of the GI Bill, De Knight traveled in 1946 to Paris, where he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts, the Académie Grande Chaumière, and the Académie Julian. In Paris, he discovered an environment that reflected the kind of freedom that an artist of color from the United States needed. He was one of many African American artists living 
and working in postwar Paris, a group which included expressionist painter Herb Gentry, modernist painter Beauford Delaney, and abstract painter Ed Clark, the first American artist credited with exhibiting a shaped canvas.
Returning to the United States after living ten years abroad, Avel de Knight settled into an apartment in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. In the 1950s, he would go on to win prizes and acclaim for his art, and supplement his income writing reviews as an art critic for the French language weekly “France-Amérique”. De Knight participated in his first group exhibition in 1953, which was held in the Village Art Center in New York City, where he was awarded the Village Art Center Prize for his work. He exhibited his work in one-man shows at the Sagittarius Gallery in New York City, his first solo show in 1957 and the second in October of 1959.
In addition to his painting and work as a critic, Avel de Knight taught at the Art Students League of New York and, as an academician well respected by the faculty and students, at the National Academy of Design for many years. Pursuing his cultural interests, de Knight spent two months in a cultural exchange program for the U.S. State Department in 1961 as an artist-lecturer in the former Soviet Union. During that time, he was particularly attracted to the regions influenced by Islam, such as 
Samarkand and Bukhara, just north of the Afghanistan border. This experience influenced his late 1960s “Mirage” series which coincided with the growing Black Arts movement in many of the urban centers throughout the United States.
Though Avel de Knight avoided any direct political statements in his work, his paintings and drawings during the latter part of the 1960s through the early 1970s can be viewed as celebrations of a perceived African aesthetic. Along with this sense of beauty, his work reflected the principles of classicism that he had internalized through his studies in Europe. From these sources, as well as Asian art and Ancient Western sculpture, de Knight was able to draw from a broad cross-section of historic world culture influences.
De Knight’s interest in spirituality, which would be more explicit in his later work, was deeply rooted in his early experiences as a member of Manhattan’s La Iglesia Católico de la Milagrosa. Located on the fringe of “El Barrio,” the church was a Spanish National Parish that served a large Spanish-speaking community. In addition to images of hooded saints, one of the most powerful images was a life-size statue of Saint
Sebastian pierced with arrows. Identified as the patron saint of the dying, and invoked as an intercessor against plague, the image of Saint Sebastian would be used by De Knight in his work as he saw the AIDS epidemic ravage the community he loved.
Avel de Knight was an Academician member of the National Academy of Design, a member of the American Watercolor Society, Audubon Society of Artists, and a member of the Audubon Society of Artists. He had a long and productive career until his death in 1995, and exhibited widely in both individual and group exhibitions. He won many awards, including the William A. Paxton Prize from the National Academy of Design and the Palmer Memorial Prize both from the National Academy School of Fine Arts, the Emily Lowe Award from the American Watercolor Society, and the Samuel F. B. Morse Medal from the National Academy School of Fine Arts.
Insert Top Image: Kurt Ammann, “Avel de Knight, Paris”, 1950
Insert Middle Image: Maurice Grosser, “Avel de Knight, Christopher Street, NYC”, 1961
Insert Bottom Image: Photographer and Date Unknown, “Avel de Knight”