Married to Jacob Lawrence for 59 years,

Gwen Knight Lawrence was also a lifelong artist and her husband's most highly valued critic. Like Jacob Lawrence, throughout her career Gwen Knight remained unswayed by abstract expressionism and other trends that moved through the art world. Though she shared Lawrence's interest in figuration, her method was more spontaneous and her subject matter more personal. She charted her own creative path in a characteristically independent way.

Gwen Knight was born in Barbados in 1913. When she was seven, her widowed mother entrusted her to close friends who brought her with them to the United States. In 1926, at the age of 13, Knight moved with her foster family from their first home in St. Louis to Harlem, where her developing interest in the arts flowered in the creative atmosphere of the Harlem Renaissance.

Growing up among freethinkers, the young Gwen was an avid reader, a lover of dance, theater, and opera, who eagerly took in the burgeoning cultural activity of Harlem. For a time her family lived in an apartment building on Seventh Avenue that was also home to the great jazz musicians Billy Strayhorn and Ethel Waters.

Knight attended Wadleigh High School, one of the few integrated schools in New York and one with a reputation for good scholarship. Her first formal study of art came at Howard University, where she studied with the painter Lois Maillou Jones and with printmaker James Lesesne Wells. Knight noted that women painters were not taken very seriously at Howard at the time, however, and when her stay there was cut short by the Depression at the end of her second year, she returned to Harlem.