By Shelli Carter /reporter
Anita Knox practices what she teaches.
The South Campus art instructor is part of Mixed Media, a three-person show at Dallas’ McKinney Avenue Contemporary art center displaying her quilts and wearable coats.
The other artists in the mixed media exhibit are Sedrick Huckaby of Fort Worth, who does oil paintings, sculptures and quilts, and Jack White, a West Texas native who does assemblage paintings, which combine various textures and materials.
Knox is skilled in different areas of art from painting to drawing to textiles. Her love of art came from her mother.
“In terms of sewing and love of textile and her hand work, she was an excellent seamstress,” Knox said. “She would make me and my sister dresses that matched and make many different things by hand. And I think it was my junior high and my high school art teachers that really encouraged me to stay interested in art and to continue in it.”
Knox began her career in painting and drawing and was inspired to take her art from the canvas and put it on fabric. In the late ’80s, she took her love of art to new measures turning her interest toward textiles. She enrolled in a basic quilting class on South Campus under Alice Allen. She started out with a small piece from one of her paintings and transferred it to fiber. She then learned different techniques to dye fabric and use wax to create design.
“The whole process now takes six to 12 months with a combo of hand quilting to machine quilting and transferring the drawing to the quilt with the different dying and wax techniques,” she said. “Some pieces can take years.”
This month, one of her quilts will be displayed in Ohio at the National Afro-American Museum and Cultural Center in its Journey of Hope exhibit, a tribute to President Barack Obama. In addition, her work has been mentioned in various art books, and one of her paintings can be found on Howard University’s Web site.
The MAC show runs through Feb. 13. The gallery is located at 3120 McKinney Ave. in Dallas. Hours are 11 a.m.-9 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday.
