A New Hampshire native, Knox received her formal art training from the Drexel Institute in Philadelphia and the Cooper Union Art School in New York, where she studied under Howard Pyle, Douglas Volk and Clifford Grayson.  Like many American artists of her time, she studied in Spain, Italy, Paris and London, and traveled extensively throughout the United States and Mexico.

Knox settled permanently in New York and kept a summer studio in York Harbor, Maine.  She belonged to the North Shore Art Association, the National Arts Club, the Pen and Brush Club and the Society of Painters in New York.  She exhibited at many prestigious venues, including the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Society of Independent Artists.  In 1918, Knox was elected a member of the National Association of Women Artists, and held a solo show at the San Diego Fine Arts Society in 1929.

With the idea that art should be concerned with social conditions, Susan Ricker Knox painted a series of European immigrants at Ellis Island in 1921.  These paintings were exhibited at the Museum of Natural History in New York during the International Conference of Eugenics, and they later hung in the Committee Room of the House of Representatives.  Of this series, one critic wrote, “Miss Knox reads the beauty in the longing faces of women; she sees expression in gaily-colored head shawls; in bright scarf ties around the baby in arms; in the mother-love beaming from sad eyes that brighten for an instant…she sees madonnas everywhere; and faces blossom in great splashes from her palette.”

Reference: For quote and additional information see, Art by American Women, Selections from the Collection of Louise and Alan Sellars (Gainesville, GA: Brenau College, 1991). SMW 6/2/03 34079