What Hangs in the Balance

Opening Reception: January 17, 2025, 6:00 – 8:00 p.m.

Artist Talk: January 17 at 6:30 p.m.

Photography Lecture: January 18 at 11:00 a.m. by Christine Garceau, PhD

Artist Gallery Talk: February 1 at 11:00 a.m.

Songs for Social Justice: Judy Fjell, singer-songwriter, Beth Youngblood, violin, and Janet Harvig, cello: February 15 at 2:00 p.m.

Katie Knight’s activist art reveals a full heart and conscience. Ethical concerns stir her creative vision and cause her to carefully hone her artistic skills. She transforms socially relevant content into compositions which are ironically beautiful. Political protest events, personal stories, and global conflict zones spill over into her prints, her photographs, her sculptures, and her work on fabric. Where and how did this strong relationship begin?

At the age of nine Katie enrolled in drawing and painting classes in her home village of Hiram, Ohio. Not long after, she accompanied her father, an anti-racist volunteer with the ACLU, on excursions into Black communities. There she saw and felt not only the effects of racism, but also the power of protests and of anti-racist education. During the war in Vietnam, Katie and her father were regularly part of antiwar protests. Her repressive high school was not far from Kent State University in Ohio, where National Guard troops fired on students, killing four. A predominant reaction of students and some teachers in Katie’s high school was that “the students deserved to be shot” – an expression of extremely polarized politics not unlike today’s culture wars. In disgust and grief, Katie dropped out of high school. She became a vegetarian, enrolled early in college, and went on to graduate Summa Cum Laude with honors in art.

In 1979 rural Michigan, while working on her first graduate degree, Katie conceived a child with a South African man, a political refugee who had been active in the African National Congress. Refusing the local hospital’s disempowering obstetric practices (mandatory episiotomy, IV, stirrups, entry fee, etc.), Katie joyfully delivered her beloved son Jikizizwe “Jika” at home in the company of three friends. That empowering birth experience led her to focus her lens on home births, and she added her vision and voice to the movement for more humane birthing practices. Later, when Katie and a new husband (who was white) adopted an eleven-year-old biracial daughter, racism continued to impact her family. Katie responded by advocating for affirmative action, supporting African American students and Black history events, and organizing Martin Luther King Day celebrations.

With her son on her back, Katie traveled to D.C. and St. Louis to march against US military intervention in Central America. She helped develop sanctuary for political refugees, and accepted invitations to serve as an official election observer in Nicaragua (1990) and El Salvador (1992). While traveling with other delegates, she photographed extensively, and helped write international reports that identified threats to democracy. Upon return home, she developed and printed the photos in her darkroom, exhibited them with educational text, made mixed media sculptures, and relief prints. She toured in the Midwest, using the photos to teach audiences in churches, schools, and community centers and to strengthen the movement for democracy at home and abroad. Katie organized solidarity projects in support of Nicaraguan sewing cooperatives and was able to send treadle sewing machines and volumes of materials to Managua.

In 1994 Katie and her family made a conscious decision to move from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to the more progressive Twin Cities, where she joined the University of Minnesota Human Rights Center, led human rights workshops in area schools, and immersed herself in art disciplines for her Masters of Fine Arts at the University. Her graduate exhibition featured activist content in diversity media – printmaking, photography, and sculpture. She traveled to Namibia and South Africa on a Fulbright Scholarship to research emerging democracy and women’s rights. She was awarded the prestigious national Jacob K. Javits Fellowship in support of her social practice of making art within context of human rights education.

In 1999, having completed her MFA and sent her children off to college, she moved to Helena, Montana. She and her then husband helped found the Montana chapter of the Colombia Support Network, which met with congressional representatives and senators, hosted Colombian activists on speaking tours around the state, and sent Montanans to Colombia. Between 2001 and 2005, Katie traveled to Colombian war zones four times to document crisis conditions while protecting endangered local social justice leaders. Using the photographs and testimony gathered on these journeys, she presented slidetalks, developed curriculum materials for human rights education, and exhibited relevant photographs, relief prints, and sculptures. Her hand-painted photographic series, Eyewitness Colombia, toured through the Museum and Art Gallery Director’s Association of Montana.

When the US responded to the September 11, 2001 destruction of the New York twin towers by invading Iraq, Katie helped lead and organize the Helena Peace Seekers. Furthermore, she and other activists began to understand how competition for petroleum profits is creating a climate disaster which threatens all forms of life. Katie joined the Alternative Energy Resource Organization (AERO) of Montana, whose goal is to build sustainable communities. She created a photographic documentary, Montana Solutions: Envision Earth Healing, which depicts farmers and ranchers devoted to innovation in sustainable agriculture and renewable energy. These documentary photographs and interviews have been shown in numerous Montana venues.

In another time and place, Katie may have come out as a lesbian at a younger age. In 2010, she and singer-songwriter-activist Judy Fjell, created a home together in which they strengthen each other’s feminism, share their passions for art activism, contribute to creative and religious communities, and find peace in exploration of wild places, native plants, and creatures. Their collaborations include video productions, and the giant Mother Earth Goddess puppet, Synnøvei, whose mission is to inspire women to create a world of freedom, justice, and love of the arts.

Katie’s work as a photojournalist, freelance photographer, and teacher of students of every age has brought her to many diverse cultural settings over the years. At St. Louis Community College in the 80’s, she developed and directed the professional photography degree program. While serving as Curator of Education at the Holter Museum of Art from 2000 to 2008 she created the intercultural artists-in-residence program, Cultural Crossroads. In Holter Museum community collaboration that included the Montana Human Rights Network, she conceived and curated the thought-provoking exhibition Speaking Volumes: Transforming Hate (SVTH) which features work by nationally prominent and emerging artists who responded to, integrated, and transformed White supremacist hate books into messages of hope and positivity. SVTH opened at the Holter Museum in January 2008, before traveling to eleven more Montana venues, then to museums and galleries from coast to coast. Katie actively curates and directs this increasingly relevant SVTH art and education project to the present day.

In the closing twelve years of her public-school teaching career, Katie taught art and gifted programs in Helena. In 2021 she left that position to make art and to care for her mother who had Alzheimer’s Disease.

Katie Knight asks what we can do to preserve and care for a world which is increasingly impacted by petroleum consumption. What Hangs in the Balance? is her installation of small, temporary dwellings creatively constructed by “settlers” out of discarded materials. The fabric house and boat forms are counterbalanced by chunks of coal and gasoline cans. Ceramic houses are inundated with rising waters. A sculptural book of cyanotype prints displays images of children who will be most impacted by our response – action or inaction. It is appropriately entitled “The Answer is in Your Hands.”