Grace Knowlton, sculptor who worked ‘in the round,’ is dead
Grace Knowlton, a sculptor who favored the elegance of the sphere, and who presented it in multiple materials and distended shapes and in sizes that ranged from the ornamental ball to an 8-foot boulder, died Dec. 4 at a memory care facility in Old Tappan, New Jersey. She was 88.
Her daughter Samantha Knowlton said the cause was complications of dementia.
Knowlton, one of the few female modernists to break into the masculine world of outdoor sculpting, created orbs of all manner, with surfaces that were rough, smooth or sometimes cut into shards, or broken and left with gaping holes. All were part of what she called her “work in the round.”
Her spheres have been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Victoria and Albert Museum in London; the Corcoran Gallery in Washington; Hirschl & Adler Modern in New York; and scores of other places. She liked to show them in groupings that she arranged spontaneously, creating their own internal dynamic in relation to one another.
Knowlton, a highly eclectic artist, was also a painter and a photographer and liked to draw. She also created a full-blown artists’ colony on her property in the exclusive hamlet of Snedens Landing, in Palisades, New York, along the west side of the Hudson River.
But her devotion was to the round.
She came to what she called her “love affair with the sphere” quite organically. When she was making ceramic pots and vases in the early 1960s, she felt a powerful urge to close their tops.
“I resisted,” she wrote in an essay in Drawing magazine in 1997, “but the rims got tighter and tighter until I gave in, closed the top and looked at my first sphere. I was fascinated by the idea of closed-in space. (In retrospect, I realize I was pregnant at the time.)”
She added, “I loved the sphere’s continuous surface to draw on — no edges, no top and no bottom.” And each material she used, whether cement, copper, sheet metal, wax, plaster or aluminum, “changed the meaning.” Creating the larger ones became a major production, and she became adept at welding.
When she could not move her biggest orbs through the narrow doors of galleries, she cut them up or broke them apart — and realized that she liked the look, and the symbolism, of broken pieces. She sometimes glued or welded them back together, sometimes not, and her spheres were increasingly pockmarked with holes or shards.
“The spheres, whose piecemeal, crinkled surfaces are full of gaps, overlaps and suture-like welds, are gently Cubist in effect,” New
York Times art critic Roberta Smith wrote in 1992.