An East Village Boutique Where the Avant-garde Meets

In 2017, Columbia University-trained oral historian Svetlana Kitto, who writes frequently about art, found herself at the Gordon Robichaux gallery researching a catalog for “Objects/Time/Proposals,” an installation by artist Ken Tisa. Encountering the name Sara Penn over and over again? Who was he?

Those with a long memory for fashion may remember Sara Penn as the owner of a boutique called Knobkerry. A pioneer shop on Seventh Avenue in the East Village opened in the mid-1960s to sell clothing, jewellery, and artworks that were globally sourced and reshaped or interpreted by Ms.

Yet it was much more than a shop. It was a saloon, a gallery, a meeting place for members of a thriving avant-garde in 1970s New York, where the middle classes left behind a largely empty Downtown fleeing a dangerous city and enthusiastically populated by artists and bohemians.

And, far from being a struggling business in a dark hole in the wall, Knobkerry was a success from the very beginning, quickly being taken over by glossy products, their offerings showcased in features that promoted things less enlightened in less enlightened times. “Gypsy chic.” Never mind that the inventory at Knobkerry routinely includes Indian cholis, silk kurta, mirror embroidery from Pakistan, Moroccan jewellery, Indonesian batik and Otomi embroidery from Mexico.

“It wasn’t just a store with a pile of items from around the world,” said Ms. Kitto in an interview to discuss “Sara Penn’s Knobkerry.” A related exhibition opened in Sculpture Center In Long Island City last week.

Ms. Kitto explained that Knobkerry is a brick-and-mortar fixture of the Downtown arts scene, creating both a trading point for ever-evolving artists, actors, dancers, and musicians, creating an environment that sometimes seems like it does. In retrospect, it’s more of a legend than a fact. Kitto, 42, claimed that this was indeed a more leavened period.

Imagine Ornette Coleman shopping at Knobkerry. So did Jimi Hendrix, Louise Bourgeois, and Lena Horne (as well as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Mia Farrow, Janis Joplin, and Yves Saint Laurent at various times in her existence). It was remarkable even in the context of a Downtown, sometimes more diverse in principle than practical, that a store could function as a lounge and gathering place for both black and white artists, as Ms. Kitto’s book makes clear. Many, as artist David Hammons explained to Ms. Kitto, “were afraid to go in when they saw all these Black people hanging out”.

A regular customer of Knobkerry’s and a loyal friend of Ms. Penn’s, Mr. Hammons transformed the gallery in 1995 with a spectacle that was as intervening as an exhibition, mounted on the walls, floors, windows, and display cases there. “My goal is to draw attention to the store,” he told Ms. Kitto in a rare interview, referring to an installation that, among other curiosities, turned a deflated basketball into a bowl of rice.

Still, Knobkerry had long attracted the attention of the press, starting in the ’60s, when the store featured on the pages of Esquire, Vogue, The New York Times, and The Chicago Tribune. On the cover of The Saturday Evening Post’s July 1968 issue, a young Lauren Hutton posed for the cover, wearing a braless and skimpy mirror-embroidered vest, silver Indian armbands from Knobkerry, and a bunch of hippie beads. The story was titled “The Great Dressed Up”, and it purported to show the magazine’s seven million readers what “distant” types were wearing “rather than clothes” on the shores.

In Ms Penn’s view, offerings at Knobkerry should never be seen as “costume” or plug-and-play, attempts to understand “world culture” decades before the term became an easy marketing tool. “People were very fond of clothes,” said Ms. Kitto.

And if some have treated Knobkerry like a museum, it was an impression that Miss Penn was in no hurry to dispel. “What he does, the way he runs his work is very relevant to young artists,” said Kyle Dancewicz, interim director of the Center for Sculpture, referring to the multidisciplinary approach to his practice that has been embraced by many young artists. “He chose a way to live in a world that was based on his own instincts and chose to privilege honesty over and over again.”

Ms. Kitto sold merchandise, of course, but said she was less influenced by creativity than by commerce and feared little of the obstacles that came her way as a Black woman in business. The protest letter in the book, a protest letter by Ms. Penn to a shelter magazine editor, discrediting Knobkerry’s contributions in a photograph illustrates the personal cost of this position.

“If I’m speaking paranoid, it’s simply because I’m a pioneer in my field and watch others drop my ideas and gain acceptance and recognition,” Ms Penn wrote. He claimed that the root cause was racism.

“It was important that everyone who worked for him knew the history of what they were selling,” said Ms. Kitto. Their goods weren’t just “ethnic” trinkets. They were 19th-century tribal Turkmen necklaces, or ancient Japanese bamboo vases, or cases of silver filigree betelnut from India (converted to minaudière by Penn).

Knobkerry is from East Seventh Street to St. Marks Place, then SoHo, and finally a store on West Broadway in TriBeCa at the turn of the millennium. Soon after, that place was shuttered, and the waters of memory closed in on it and on it.

Before Miss Kitto appeared, her contributions seemed destined to be lost, obviously. The dozen or so interviews Ms. Kitto conducted attempted to fill an eventful life in every way, attempting to fill a life whose cast encompasses a Black creative class Who’s Who and whose dramatic turns include a series of failed relationships and a disastrous marriage.

For a time, Ms. Penn even escaped from New York and lived with her mother in Pasadena, California. Inevitably, she returned to Manhattan, storing or distributing her various collections among her friends by then, and moving into a single room. Markle is a Salvation Army-run women’s residence on West 13th Street.

He told Ms. Kitto in her last interview before she died at the age of 93 that her place of stay was no bigger than three tables put together. However, three meals a day were included in the rent, and so he spent the last ten uncertain years of his life in the Markle residence.

“I was determined to find the woman,” said Miss Kitto, and through her, the key to a Downtown scene that is unlikely to be repeated. “Who was Sara Penn?”

Miss Penn was, as she was, a woman as amazing as the goods she presented. Born in rural Arkansas in 1927, he grew up in Pittsburgh and was educated at Spelman College. He was a natural sage, trained as a social worker, with an unfailing eye and extraordinary taste. He lived in Paris for a time, visiting frequently at a time when Cedar Bar was the canteen of the Abstract Expressionists, navigating bohemian New York with ease, though he rarely ventured north of 14th Street. (As an old friend of Ms. Penn’s told Ms. Kitto, she considered herself one of the “City girls”.)

Above all, he was a natural teacher.

“He had a wonderful talent for bringing out the beauty in things and quality in people,” artist Mr. Tisa said at a conference last week. Sculpture Center Unveiling works by Niloufar Emamifar and Soil Thornton: small portable boxes and scrap object suits created in the spirit of Knobkerry. “Sara has helped me many times. Helped David Hammons.”

Ms. Kitto, whose book aims to change that perception, has helped so many people get started or get into the store that it “seems horrible that so few people know who she is.”

A handful of works of art from his 15 oral history have been collected in “Ursula”. daily Edited by author Randy Kennedy and autographed by powerhouse gallery Hauser & Wirth. If there is a central motif that ties together Miss Kitto’s oral histories, it takes the form of fables that show either Mr. Penn’s generous spirit or his stubborn timidity struck by the force of a blow.

So, at the entrance to the Sculpture Center show is an antique beaded mace, a stick used in East and South Africa for hunting or hitting enemies in the head.

“Sara was the most generous teacher and friend you could imagine if she liked you,” said Mr. Tisa. “He could have fired you with one look if he didn’t think you were so great.”