Sara Penn

Svetlana Kitto compiled an oral history of Sara Penn and Knobkerry after researching a catalogue for Ken Tisa's exhibition at Gordon Robichaux Gallery, where she repeatedly came across Penn's name and mentions of Knobkerry. This oral history was ultimately compiled for a 2021 exhibition at SculptureCenter–curated by interim director Kyle Dancewicz and including sculptures by Niloufar Emamifar and SoiL Thornton.

Among numerous other publications, her designs were notably featured on the covers of Esquire and The Saturday Evening Post, as well as several Virginia Slims ad campaigns featuring Beverly Johnson for Essence in 1977, and for Jet in 1975.

Designs from Knobkerry utilizing Pakistani textiles were sold in the museum shop to accompany a 1969 exhibition of Pakistani craftwork at the Smithsonian Institution Arts and Industries Building.

It has been speculated (though never confirmed) that Yves Saint Laurent, a frequent customer of Knobkerry, was influenced by Penn's designs for his Spring/Summer 1967 collection.

She traveled throughout Europe in the 1950s, living briefly in Paris and Amsterdam. Eventually moving back to New York, she took a job as a social worker and began a romantic relationship with the painter Wolf Kahn. Kahn and Penn were regulars at the Cedar Bar where she met artists like Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and Joan Mitchell. She began to apprentice at Phyllis Jewelry, a silver store on East 7th Street. Here she would meet not only her future business partners—Fumi Schmidt, a dancer and seamstress who sewed most of the creations and Olive Wong, a theatrical designer who procured textiles for Penn, but also friend and contemporary Art Smith, a jeweler, and Barbara Shaum, a sandal maker whose shop adjoined McSorley's Bar and would eventually become Penn's first shopfront.

Her store Knobkerry, was a reference to "The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God", a 1932 short story by George Bernard Shaw. In the allegorical satire the South African protagonist flees a mission with only her knobkerrie, a Zulu fighting stick. She sets out for God, and anytime she comes across someone who tries to tell her who God is, she simply hits them with her knobkerrie and continues her search. The store changed locations numerous times, and other than a short stint in California, remained generally in Manhattan's Lower East Side.

Sara Penn (1927–2020) was the owner of Knobkerry, a clothing and antiques store, gallery, cultural center, and arts space in Downtown Manhattan from the 1960s to the 1990s. Penn designed clothes that utilized global and historical textiles. Many of her clothing display strong African, East and Southeast Asian, and Indigenous American influences. She also maintained and displayed an inventory of art objects from across the globe.

Sara Penn was born in Pittsburgh to an affluent African American family in 1927. Her great aunt followed Booker T. Washington's urge to provide skilled training for newly freed slaves, teaching quilting and sewing. She opened a training school that grew to have over 200 students. Penn recognizes a closeness with this relative that she attributes her own career to. After attending Spelman College, Penn earned a social work degree from Atlanta University, where she would take a religion class with Martin Luther King Jr. She maintained her career as a social worker part-time even years into Knobkerry's success.