Stephen Knapp

In early 2007, "Stephen Knapp: Lightpaintings" opened at the Alden B. Dow Museum in Midland, Michigan, before traveling to the Butler Institute of American Art, in Youngstown, Ohio, followed in 2008 by the Dennos Museum Center, in Traverse City, Michigan, and the South Dakota Museum of Art, and in 2009, by the Dahl Arts Center in Rapid City, South Dakota. The exhibit firmly placed lightpaintings at the intersection between painting and sculpture. 2009 saw a commissioned installations and a solo lightpainting exhibit at the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia,

In 2006, Knapp's first major exterior lightpainting, Luminous Affirmations, a permanent 60-foot × 100-foot exterior installation, was installed on the north face of Tampa, Florida’s City Hall as part of their "Lights on Tampa” program. Large-scale commissions followed throughout 2006, including his Seven Muses, a 35-foot × 95-foot commission for the Charles W. Eisemann Center, in Richardson, Texas, and First Symphony, for the Sursa Performance Hall at Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana.

In 2005, he received his first museum commission from the Flint Institute of Arts, Flint, Michigan. Temporal Meditations, a 9-foot × 30-foot installation, became the first lightpainting in a museum collection.

In a series of solo shows in 2004 and 2005 Knapp experimented with new coatings and laminating techniques that took him beyond dichroics and increased the range of his palette and gave him greater control in painting with light.

In 2002, after nearly a decade of development, Knapp introduced his lightpaintings. No longer hanging glass and steel structures, in these new works the glass was attached to walls with a single light fixture illuminating the entire piece. The light that passed through the various pieces of glass was no longer an effect in space, as it was in the sculptural lightpaintings, but was now simultaneously collected and dispersed on the wall.

During the 1990s, his increasing fascination with light led Knapp to kiln-formed glass—the heating of glass to take on the shape of a form below, resulting over the decade in large installations across the United States. An acknowledged expert in his field, he frequently wrote and lectured on architectural art glass, the collaborative process, and the integration of art and architecture. In 1998 he authored The Art of Glass for Rockport Publishers.

Also during the 1990s he started spending more time on personal work, creating sculpture as well as furniture from kiln formed glass and steel and hanging pieces of dichroic glass and stainless steel.

Research took Knapp to Japan in 1985, where he created some of the world's largest glass-glaze ceramic murals. He had come upon a factory in Japan that made huge photo-ceramic murals, a technique used by Robert Rauschenberg in the early 1980s. Though the photo decal technique seemed tailor-made for him, he became fascinated with a thick glass glaze—a crackle glaze—that had been developed for architecture. Changing surfaces to reflect the light was to become a major influence on later work.

Stephen Knapp graduated from Worcester Academy in 1965 and received his B.A. from Hamilton College in 1969. For nearly a decade after graduating from college, he worked as a fine art photographer, selling his work to corporate and private collectors in the United States and abroad. During this early stage in his career, Knapp worked closely with Polaroid Corporation on their 20x24 camera, creating large scale instant photographs.

Stephen Knapp (October 15, 1947 – November 24, 2017) was an American artist best known for his use of the medium of lightpainting. A native of Worcester, Massachusetts, he gained an international reputation for large-scale works of art held in museums, public, corporate, and private collections, which are executed in media as diverse as light, kiln-formed glass, metal, stone, mosaic, and ceramic.