The Collaborative | Simmie Knox: Selected Works

February 15th, 2025- April 26th, 2025

Simmie Knox (b. 1935), A Place: Suspended, 1970. Acrylic and enamel on canvas (diptych). Photography courtesy of Greg Staley.

The Kreeger Museum is pleased to present Simmie Knox: Selected Works, on view from February 15th through April 26th, 2025. Works on view include three abstract paintings from 1970 and one painted in 2024.

This exhibition is presented under The Collaborative, a program developed by The Kreeger Museum in 2021 to support Washington-area artists.

About Simmie Knox

A graduate of Tyler School of Art at Temple University (BFA, Magna Cum Laude; MFA) in Philadelphia, Simmie Knox, in the 1970s, exhibited as an abstract artist and worked for The Museum of African Art in Washington, DC. Throughout the 70s, Knox also taught art at various colleges and universities in Delaware, Pennsylvania, and the District of Columbia. 

This abstract diptych by Knox from 1970, entitled A Place: Suspended, is a large-scale work, composed of two panels covered with surging waves of color, from rich earthy reds and yellows to deep, vibrant blues and greens.  In a 2007 interview with Amy Cavanaugh for the DCist, Knox explained 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.”

A Place: Suspended was included in the 32nd Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1971, where David and Carmen Kreeger first saw the work before acquiring it.  Knox moved to the Washington area in 1972, and soon turned away from abstraction to focus exclusively on portraiture. While Knox has remarked that the change was driven by his penchant for capturing the human figure, he attributes his time working in abstract painting as important to his understanding of space and color.