Born Gina Schnaufer to an affluent Marietta, Ohio, family for whom art was not considered a serious activity, she studied at Smith College and eventually left an unhappy first marriage.
On seeing a group of John Marin's New Mexico watercolors in a 1930 New York gallery exhibition, she was inspired to move to the state by his depictions of Native American Pueblo life.
[1] Arriving in New Mexico in 1931, Gina Schnaufer spent her first year in the region attending Native American ceremonials and dances, paying close attention to the colors and patterns in the scenes she witnessed.
Although there was a nine-year age difference, Schnaufer married the younger artist in 1933, and is best known by his surname despite a subsequent 1945 marriage to the painter Alexander Brook.
"[3] Moving north to the Tesuque Valley, the Knees built a home using local materials that welcomed the outside in, with portals and patios aplenty.
As the 1930s drew to a close, Knee began to move away from formalist figure-ground painting traditions and to more abstracted work, often a meandering mix of color and forms, with calligraphic lines and agile brushwork.
In late 1942, Knee decided to join her husband in Los Angeles, where they explored the city and delved into the West Coast art scene, meeting luminaries like Man Ray and Thomas Mann.
In 1943, convinced that her marriage was over, after fulfilling her commitment to provide a body of work for a New York exhibit at Marian Willard's Gallery, Knee returned to New Mexico.
With the knowledge that she could scrape away and re-do allowed her new ways to explore texture, color and brushstrokes, telling gallery owner Willard in a letter that she no longer felt "in tune with watercolor painting at all when I attempt it."
The emergence of Abstract Expressionism and Knee worked to establish a sense of community to with the artists who were coming to the forefront of the American art scene, but she remained on the periphery of the movement, never truly integrating with the likes of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.