We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jill Knox. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jill below.

Alright, Jill thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Do you feel you or your work has ever been misunderstood or mischaracterized? If so, tell us the story and how/why it happened and if there are any interesting learnings or insights you took from the experience?

The joke about me as a kid was that I could never stick with a hobby. I remember my mother describing me to someone by drawing a line in the air with her finger and it going this way and that, never straight. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to love doing one thing so much that there would be no question about how I would spend my life and the goals to achieving that things or the pursuit of that career would be more obvious. Sometimes I wonder what a straight-lined life would look like.

I have an MFA in acting from Brown University and I pursued acting for a while when I graduated, but visual art called to me very loudly. I get restless waiting for opportunities to be creative and much prefer to wake up and make something, everyday, without the permission of someone else. I grew up going to museums and my parents are deeply embedded in the museum worlds of New York City and Southern California. holding buyer positions, board positions, and Chairman positions for the past 40 years, so becoming an artist felt like an inevitability.

I operate under 2 names. Under my own name, Jill Knox, I make mixed media paintings using yarn and acrylic paint. I have sold painting to some incredibly talented and, I suppose rather famous, folks in town, and also to several film and TV projects (Power, Starz, Single Parents, ABC, Bad Hair, Netflix, etc) My secondary line, The Young Rebel’s Studio focuses more on functional art. I had a coaster line that I sold in stores all over the US for years. I was solely focused on this side of my creativity for a solid decade but would occasionally act in my husband’s projects if he asked me to. He is a director, actor and writer. I was stunned when a web series he created, in which we play versions of ourselves and shot it in our house, would lead us to being cast as husband and wife on the NBC series, Connecting, and the Apple+ series, Shrinking.

I am currently straddling both sides of my creative self, acting (when given the opportunity, with the help of my incredible team of agents and manager) and building a collection of art work that I hope to show in 2025, while also teaching in the theater department at Pomona College. Am I exhausted? Yes. When people ask, “what do you do?” do I find it impossible to answer? Yes. Would I ever pick one of those paths and stay on it? No.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I got my MFA in acting 2008 and while I studied at a very liberal school in a very liberal city, I experienced a ton of racism. I was asked to disregard what I knew was right and just for the sake of the “art.” I was asked to sit with discomfort for the sake of keeping my white classmates and the white leaders of the school more comfortable. I was told, week 2 of my first year, that “no one wants to be your partner because you’re B.L.A.C.K.” (black was sung with an elongated “kay” and a finger in the air as if she were conducting an orchestra.) I retreated into myself that semester, feeling vulnerable and unsafe, and when I finally had the courage to speak up during an end of semester post-mortem discussion, I was put on probation for “putting the spotlight on myself and taking away from the hard work of everyone else in my class.”

All of this to say, whatever I am working on, and I am so proud to say I have had some very cool opportunities, my goal is rarely to make money or gain recognition. My goal is to make an impact – whether that’s creating conversation pieces for your coffee table, creating a installation for the lobby of the ad agency, Deutsch, for black history month, or teaching acting classes to college students.

When asked to describe my line, The Young Rebel’s Studio, I say “I make functional art for activists, artists, thinkers, and drinkers”. Since 2015, I have created items for household and body that seeks to empower. I handmade coasters that sold in stores coast to coast, designed prayer candles, and I hand paint sneakers, jackets, pillows and chairs. In 2020, teaming up with my friend, actor Ben Feldman, I painted 100 pairs of kid’s sneakers and we sold them to raise money for Black Lives Matter, Fair Fight, and National Birth Equity Collaborative. We sold out and raised $10,000 in 8 days.

I mainly make limited run items now, or take commissions. My last item: 20 etched glass vases, 10 small, 10 large, sold out in a week the theme was based on the bell hooks quote, “No Justice, No Love.” I will spend the summer working on a collection of wall art and functional art titled, “Black People Live Here,” highlighting what it was like to grow up in a black household.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

I have always been unafraid to be myself. The lack of fear of what others think of me is luxury but it has scared people away from me in the past. I think maybe those people worried that I’d expose them in some way, just by existing unapologetically. Having fully settled into the artist that I am and using my voice to create work that speaks loudly and directly, I tend to gravitate towards and attract others who exist similarly. The community I have built alongside my artist husband is an incredible reward.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

A lesson I had to unlearn is that being an artist means that you will starve. People hear “that person is an artist” and they think “lacking direction,” “head in the clouds,” “not a serious person.” Young, budding artists receive judgment for being emotional, for pointing out the elephant in the room out loud, for getting mediocre grades in school.

Artist don’t always make the best students, especially within the regular high school format of cramming information for 40 min, barely getting a break, and cramming again. Once I got to college and worked out a schedule where my classes were once or twice a week in long blocks with lots of room around them to digest, learning clicked for me. I graduated magna cum laude from NYU which was a surprise to a lot of people who truly underestimated me. My uncle, who thinks that the only measure of success is money, asked me why my tassel was gold while most people had purple tassels. I told him it was for graduating with honors. He looked stunned. I knew, my entire life, that I ranked low on his “that person will be a success one day” list because he did not think I was a serious person. Artists have to make their own way in the world, without taking on the opinion of others. The world needs artists. They need us to decorate their homes, to entertain them, to educate them, but it can be scary to live authentically when people are constantly trying to dissuade you from following a calling.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.theyoungrebelsstudio.com
• Instagram: jillknoxpowell and theyoungrebelsstudio
• Other: imdb.me/jillknox

Image Credits
I took all of these photos