Nostalgia is just a kind way to say you don’t like to throw something out.” Astra Dorf is telling me a story about her mother, the artist Dina Knapp. “She had a very aggressive form of cancer, and she was in her room in hospice and I was there starting to clean up. I thought I could slowly get things out the door and she wouldn’t notice. I picked up this fashion magazine full of tabs and the cover was ripped off to reveal a perfume ad. In Sharpie, in her handwriting, was written ‘Keep Forever’. Now how was I ever supposed to throw that away? So we created this hashtag for her, #keepforever.”
The notion of keeping things forever, of using everything and wasting nothing, had always been a part of Dina Knapp’s life and work. She was born in Cyprus to a dressmaker mother and spent her early life in Israel until the family relocated to Brooklyn when she was 13. Both parents were Holocaust survivors, which no doubt shaped her ethos from a very young age. “There was this whole feeling of not wanting to get rid of anything,” says Astra, “like things could get taken from you at any time.”
Not yet fluent in English, Dina threw herself into art as a way to communicate – she drew, sculpted and eventually enrolled in the Fashion Industries High School with the goal of being a designer and illustrator – but subsequently found her freeform approach and avant-garde aesthetic at odds with patternmaking’s relative rigidity.
Once she began to attend the Pratt Institute, everything changed. Dina formed a deep sisterhood with four other kindred spirits, future pioneers in the Art to Wear movement that are now collectively known as the Pratt 5: Janet Lipkin, Sharron Hedges, Marika Contompasis and Jean Cacicedo (profiled in More Or Less 3). In the culturally charged atmosphere of the late 1960s, they began exploring traditional craft techniques long thought of as women’s work: crochet, knitting, embroidery, and appliqué. Dina picked up crochet and began to create wearable sculptures using the natural world as her main source of inspiration. On of her first major projects, The Whole Earth Tapestry (1973), is a large-scale crochet work in earth tones representing “universal images of Heaven and Earth”. It took two years to complete. Orchid Jacket (1973) interprets the flower almost like an abstract painting, while Fungus Jacket (1974) is an impossibly thick technical marvel that depicts fungi growing on a gnarled trunk, yet also evokes the more psychedelic properties of the mushroom. Astra explains, “For her, everything had a cause. It wasn’t just something that looked pretty. If you are thinking about natural elements in your work, you’re obviously thinking about the greater whole of the planet.”
A relocation to Miami Beach in 1977 coincided with a marked shift in Dina’s work. Influenced by her new tropical surroundings, organic forms gave way to geometric shapes and brighter colours, and she began to address more political and community-focused issues. Knapp and her husband Jeffrey’s shared passion for reggae deepened around this time, and the couple would make annual trips to Reggae Sunsplash in Jamaica. Even if you aren’t familiar with Dina Knapp by name, you’ve likely seen her work. Bob Marley’s beloved tam (the hat was so precious to him that he is buried in it) was crocheted by Dina and gifted via a mutual friend.
Astra recalls meeting Marley on a beach when she was a child: “My mom was very, very starstruck and nervously excited. She grabbed my hand and walked over to him and said, ‘Hi, I’m Dina, I’m the one that made you the tam.’ He didn’t look at us once; he was looking up. He just said, ‘Nice, nice, irie’, and then she said, ‘This is my daughter Astra’, and again he said, ‘Nice, nice’, and kept his focus on the sky. I was so little and like, ‘Mom what’s wrong with him?’ Of course, now we know what was going on!”
Dina Knapp never stopped making art, though she transitioned from garments to collages during the latter part of her career. I’m struck by how contemporary and relevant her work still feels – the preoccupation with the Earth and its climate, the offbeat colour sensibility, the organised chaos of the motifs, and even the method of crochet itself.
In the photos Astra has shared with me of her mother’s home, most of the walls’ real estate is taken up by folk art and the bins in her studio overflow with piles of ephemera waiting to be used. Again, I think of organised chaos. Organised because she knew where everything was – from buttons to doll parts. When Dina passed, her family gave a treasure trove of supplies to artist friends so they could recycle even further and keep the line of creativity going. I love this quote from the rabbi at her service: “She wasn’t a hoarder. Hoarders don’t sort.”
Art direction: Jeanne Alexandre. Hair: Paula McCash. Make-up: Rebecca Muir. Models: Andreia, Maura, Maria, Ines