KNOWLEDGE BENNETT

(Asbury Park, NJ, b. 1976) is a self-taught multi-medium visual artist. His body of work archives a pursuit of autonomy and a yearning to operationalize the voice of visual narrative.

Bennett’s creative exploration began with photography and postwar-inspired silk screen painting, which interrogated the present-day crises of Black existence in America. Series of works including Orange is the New Black, Obama Cowboy, and the widely successful silkscreen series Cojones, elevated Bennett within the domestic and international contemporary art world. Bennett has several paintings within the permanent collection of Delta Airlines and in private collections in major cities throughout the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia.

His most recent body of work departs from the representational, instead pointing towards a study of timeless subject matter, ushering the viewers and the artist into an expansive new discourse. Bennett’s Black Paintings illustrate notions of identity that exist outside of the body, depicting humanity grounded within the calming cosmological divinities that birthed it. The series seeks to nurture experiences of mindful listening, as the expanse of voice and image is reflected back upon the viewer. His work has been featured in popular media, such as the Netflix series #blackAF. Through a committed engagement with the processes of healing, Bennett provokes simultaneously introspective and transcendental dialogues. 

Along this journey of depiction and amplification, Bennett has worked to develop the requisite resources and cultural assets for individual and collective resilience—the authority to determine the ways in which we contribute to humanity. In 2018 he founded The KNOW Contemporary, an art gallery that challenges traditional thinking about the utility of creative production within the community. Bennett currently resides in Los Angeles, CA.