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 Avel de Knight was born in New York City to parents from the Caribbean islands of Barbados
and Puerto Rico. He studied art at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY from 1941 to 1942 before serving in a segregated U.S. Army unit during the last two years of World War II. In 1946, like
a number of other Black American artists of the period, de Knight moved to Paris where he studied under the G.I. Bill at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, and the Académie Julian.
He had his first group exhibition in the U.S. at the Village Art Center in New York City in 1953. In 1856, after ten years of living and studying in France, de Knight returned to the
United States. The following year he had his first one-man show at the Sagittarius Gallery in New York. Around this time he also began writing art criticism for the French language weekly France-Amerique.
De Knight enjoyed a long and productive career, exhibiting widely in group and solo shows and garnering numerous honors and awards. His résumé lists some two dozen awards, notable among them, the William A. Paxton Prize from
the National Academy of Design (1958), the Ranger Fund Purchase Prize and the Palmer Memorial Prize both from the National Academy School of Fine Arts (1958), and the Emily Lowe Award from the American Watercolor Society
(1958). In i961 he received a U.S. State Department Cultural Exchange Grant for travel to the former Soviet Union where he lectured and gave demonstrations in watercolor painting in several major cities.
His painting, “Mediterranean”, was acquired by the American Watercolor Society and donated to The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, where it was included in the Museum’s 1966 exhibition “Faces and Figures: Selected Works by Black Artists”. De Knight was elected an Associate of the National Academy of Design in 1966, and was named
Academician in 1970. He taught at the National Academy School of Fine Arts from 1981 until his death.
De Knight’s work can be found in a number of important public collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City; National Academy of Design, New York City; The Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia;
Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York City; Springfield Art Museum, Springfield, Missouri; Marsh Art Gallery, University of Richmond Museums, Richmond, Virginia; Denison University Art Gallery, Granville,
Ohio; Lehigh University Art Galleries, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; Robert Hull Fleming Museum, University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont; Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey; Southern
Vermont Art Center, Manchester, Vermont; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Avel de Knight died in 1995 in New York City.
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