He’s best known as a locally-based portrait painter, but Simmie Knox began his career painting abstract works, like A Place: Suspended, which is on display at the Kreeger Museum. The only work by Knox in the museum, the Kreegers saw it at the 32nd Corcoran Biennial in 1971, and purchased the painting.

Knox, 72, is an artist with strong ties to the Washington area. He currently lives and works in Silver Spring, and has been in the area since 1972, when he started teaching at Bowie State University. He has been painting since he was nine, when his teacher would ask him to decorate the classroom for holidays.

He made A Place: Suspended with acrylic paint on cotton canvas, and estimates that a painting like it would take two to three weeks to complete, since he works on more than one at a time.

Knox explains that the motivation behind A Place: Suspended is color. “It’s a piece that I produced because at the time I was really concerned with the movement of color when it's sprayed as opposed to painted, and the visual effects you could provide,” he says, “[Spraying color] creates a kind of an illusion.”

Though Knox no longer paints abstractly, and focuses on portraits and sculpture, he explains how his education in abstract painting affects his portraiture. While Knox was at graduate school at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art, “Most instructors were abstract painters who frowned on figure, so I put it aside and picked up abstract,” he says, “It was the best thing I ever could have done, since it gave me a chance to explore in detail the elements of design and the particulars of composition and foundations of making visual art…. You have to be able to understand the elements of design, color, texture and shapes, and that colors advance and recede — cool colors recede and warm colors advance. So when I got into the abstract it gave me a chance to explore in detail this visual effect that colors have on the eye. Even today in all my portraits, I still go abstract [with the] background.”

Knox painted portraits of Frederick Douglass (part of the Museum of African Art's permanent collection), Justice Thurgood Marshall and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg before painting Bill and Hillary Clinton’s portraits for the White House in 2004. Painting the Clintons earned Knox a lot of press because he was the first black artist to paint an official presidential portrait.

A Place: Suspended has been on display in the Director’s office since 1994, when the museum opened. Though not a scheduled stop on the guided tour, the Kreeger accommodates visitors who express an interest in seeing the painting, so make sure to ask to see the work when you visit the museum.

The Kreeger Museum is located at 2401 Foxhall Road, NW, and is open 10 a.m.-4 p.m. on Saturday, with reservations for Tuesday-Friday visits. See the museum’s web site for more information.

A Place: Suspended
Simmie Knox
1970