Described as “one of the first stores in the United States to sell ethnographic art, objects, and clothing from all over the world,” Knobkerry was a site of aesthetic and cultural innovation—more than a shop, it straddled a multiplicity of identities to become a salon, a gathering place, a dressmaker’s atelier, a gallery, a laboratory for ideas. The creation of Sara Penn (1927 - 2020), a Black artist, curator and entrepreneur, Knobkerry existed in various iterations around downtown New York City for almost thirty years.
This past weekend I had the opportunity to sit down with Svetlana Kitto, a writer and the oral historian behind a new book, Sara Penn’s Knobkerry. Published to coincide with an exhibition at Long Island City’s SculptureCenter, it gathers together fifteen interviews that Kitto did over a three-year period with people associated with Knobkerry. SculptureCenter’s exhibition, “Niloufar Emamifar, SoiL Thornton, and an Oral History of Knobkerry,” places Kitto’s book as an interactive sculpture at its entrance—inviting the visitor to sit and read about Sara Penn before venturing downstairs to view artworks by Niloufar Emamifar and SoiL Thornton. These sculptures were not created in response to the oral histories or any knowledge of Knobkerry, but instead are meant to elicit conversation on consumerism and creative identity while imagining a world where Sara Penn’s Knobkerry is still widely known and respected.
While I knew of Knobkerry (you can’t spend as much time as I have researching “ethnic” and countercultural dress in the late 1960s without coming across the name), I had never delved into it. If I had, I would have realized earlier the breadth of influence that Sara Penn’s Knobkerry had on downtown New York from the mid-1960s to early 1990s, through spreading knowledge and interest in world textiles, garments and decorative arts, and therefore impacting the wider art and music worlds through the connections she instigated. With Knobkerry a central gathering place for downtown’s community of Black artists and musicians, Sara Penn’s influence far surpassed the beauty of the garments she created and objects she collected. Long forgotten, her influence is reconstructed through the oral history interviews with her friends and associates—they provide not just an exploration of her legacy as a curator and shopkeeper, but also build an understanding of a complex, beloved individual who fought against systemic racism to create her own unique world.
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