When she recently lectured to almost a hundred colleagues about her fiber art works, the extent and variety of Dina Knapp’s creativity was largely received as a surprise. All these art people and few knew of her history, the fact that the first ever coffee table book on Art To Wear [1986] featured no fewer than nine of her original designs, that her client list has included such celebrities as Cher, Bob Marley, Joanne Woodward and Phyllis Diller, or that she has been costuming dancers, actors, opera singers and performance artists in Miami for three decades.

Here at last in the MIA Gallery visitors will see for themselves the Knapp miracle of production, a retrospective exhibition including crocheted and appliquéd clothing, vinyl encased collages featuring old Miami scenes derived from vintage postcards, books – both her history series and her memory series – wall pieces, masks, and accessories. The work is like her home, a walk-in collage of layered stuff, a mix of art and artifacts, dense and marvelous, a real magic kingdom. Knapp thinks in strata, piles and tiers of materials that enhance each other visually though often coming from diverse high-and-low sources.

Born in Cyprus and brought up in Israel and in New York City, Knapp was part of that first generation of Whole Earth activists. She and her friends sought raw wool from upstate farms, which they carded and spun, dying the fibers with vegetable dyes that they made themselves - all of which accounts for the special nature of the color and heft of her early wearable artworks. After Knapp moved to Miami in 1977, she was inspired to make lighter creations, reflecting both the new influence of Miami’s sunny climate and its evolving cultural life. Even so, Knapp continues to work as always, building up layers of content in a mélange of materials to create multi-textured works in her telltale, signature style.

Helen L. Kohen
Art Historian and Critic

 View Brochure 
 Press Release

October 2011 - January 2012
  
just past the Concourse E security checkpoint.

For more information on this exhibition, please contact the Miami-Dade Aviation Department’s
Division of Fine Arts and Cultural Affairs at 305-876-0749.