Alison Knowles

She graduated from Pratt Institute in New York with an honors degree in fine art. In May 2015, she was awarded an honorary doctorate degree by Pratt. In the 1960s, she was an active participant in New York City's downtown art scene, collaborating with influential artists such as John Cage and Marcel Duchamp. During this time she began producing event scores, or performances that rework the everyday into art. Knowles's inclusion of visual, aural, and tactile elements sets her art apart from the work of other Fluxus artists. The exhibition then embarked on an international tour: Museum Wiesbaden, Germany: September 20, 2024–January 26, 2025; Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Saint-Étienne, France: November 8, 2025–March 15, 2026; Nikolaj Kunstahal, Copenhagen: April 25–July 26, 2026 and culminating at New York University's Grey Art Museum where it will be on exhibit September 9, 2026—January 30, 2027. • Illustration — Alison Knowles (right) performing one of her pieces on stage with her daughter Hannah Higgins at the Fluxus Semicentenary in San Francisco, CA in September, 2011

• Name — Alison Knowles • Born — 29 April 1933 • Birthplace — New York, New York, U.S. • Died — 29 October 2025 • Place of death — New York, U.S. • Field — Performance art, Printmaking • Movement — Fluxus

Transferring from Middlebury College in Vermont, Knowles graduated from the Pratt Institute in 1956. Since her father, Edwin Knowles, was a professor at Pratt, she was able to enroll in the school at no cost. During night classes, Knowles studied painting with abstract expressionist Adolph Gottlieb. She admired Helen Frankenthaler and had acquaintance with the work of Jackson Pollock. Franz Kline also taught some of the painting courses. During the day, Knowles studied graphic design and commercial layout. A class taught by painter Richard Lindner proved very influential for Knowles. “What I learned there was that I am an artist. What I should have learned there is that I am not a painter,” said Knowles in a 2006 interview. In addition to her father, Knowles noted John Cage as another one of her mentors. She knew of Cage through one of his courses taught at the New School for Social Research in 1958. Many of the Fluxus leaders, such as Dick Higgins, George Brecht, Al Hansen, and Allan Kaprow, took the historic class. Knowles's focus on painting diminished after her show at the Nonegon Gallery in New York, in which she destroyed all of her works in a bonfire behind her brother's house. This act of destruction led directly to her association with other types of work and eventually with Fluxus. On the first Fluxus tour in 1962, Knowles began to write event scores, which would quickly become a major aspect of the movement. After participating in the initial Fluxus Festivals in Europe from 1962 to 1963, Knowles returned to the United States and began making objects, some as Fluxus multiples commissioned by George Maciunas, the leader of the movement. Knowles's object-based pieces focus on the audience's tactile and audible interaction with the artwork. While her counterparts targeted the conventions of music, Knowles focused on poetry and the significance of spoken word. During the 1960s, she began to incorporate beans in her art, a common motif in her work. The bean was a unique object to use at a time when other Fluxus artists employed street detritus, readymades, and assemblage objects.

With the invitation of Maciunas, Knowles produced one of her earliest book objects, the Bean Rolls (1963). Unlike a traditional bound volume, the pages of this work are tiny paper scrolls, which the reader may select and view in any order. On each scroll, Knowles printed found texts collected from songs, recipes, stories, science, cartoons, and advertisements. The tin also contains dried beans, which create a rattling sound as the container is handled. In the 1960s, Knowles expanded on this performative aspect of Bean Rolls by staging readings with multiple participants. In 1967, Knowles created The House of Dust, perhaps the most widely known example of computer-generated digital poetry, in collaboration with composer James Tenney. The poem began as a set of four lists written by Knowles. Selecting a phrase from each list would describe a house made of a certain material, in a particular location, illuminated by a light source, and sheltering various inhabitants. She gave the lists to Tenney, who generated the printed poetry using the FORTRAN programming language on an early IBM computer. The poem was included in the exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity. The output yielded a permutation sequenced by chance. From roughly 10,000 possible stanzas, Knowles selected one quatrain—"a house of dust / on open ground / lit by natural light / inhabited by friends and enemies"—as the basis for an interactive sculpture on the California Institute of the Arts campus in the early 1970s. Knowles expanded the scale of her book projects with The Big Book (1967), a walk-in construction composed of eight moveable "pages”, each four feet wide by eight feet tall, anchored to a metal spine. Each page featured an access point leading to the next, forming different spaces and ways the reader could approach the book. The composition weighed about a ton, and contained a gallery, library, grass tunnel, and window. It was built using found materials such as a toilet, stove, and telephone from her apartment and studio, and could be packaged and shipped in two crates. The book traveled to cities in Canada, Europe, and the United States, gradually disintegrating into its individual components by the time it reached its final destination in San Diego, California. The Big Book inspired her other large-scale installations, The Book of Bean and The Boat Book. In addition to exploring the sculptural potential of a book, Knowles also wrote and produced several books of experimental text and poetry. The Boat Book premiered at Art Basel Miami Beach in January 2014. Knowles said, "The grass tunnel will be replaced by a hoop structure between two pages covered with blue silk like the ocean." The "book sculpture", as she referred to it, also contains a porthole, fishing nets and a fishing pole, an anchor, and other accoutrements of water travel.

Knowles was active in sound from the late 1960s on. In 1969, Knowles designed and co-edited John Cage's Notations, a book of music manuscripts published by the Something Else Press. Her Bean Garden, first presented at the Annual Avant Garde Festival of New York, consists of a large amplified platform covered with beans. Most recently reconstructed for the Alison Knowles exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Bean Garden invites visitors to walk through the platform, allowing the sounds of the beans to resonate with each step. Knowles also created a series of sounded objects, including the bean turner (a handcrafted flax paper pouch filled with beans), wrist rubbers (flax paper "gloves" embedded with beans), and a bamboo and flax accordion. Knowles's interest in the sounds produced by beans was explored in a series of four radio programs hosted by the German station Westdeutscher Rundfunk, whose director was a friend and supporter of John Cage. In 1982, Knowles was awarded the Karl Sczuka Award for best radio work from WDR for her event score, Bean Sequences.

Knowles was born in New York City, on April 29, 1933. She was married to Dick Higgins, a leading Fluxist who coined the term "intermedia". She had twin daughters, Jessica and Hannah Higgins. Jessica is a New York-based intermedia artist closely associated with seminal curator Lance Fung, late Fluxus gallerist Emily Harvey, and the International Artists' Museum's Construction in Process. Hannah is a writer, art historian, and professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Both daughters performed and collaborated in original Fluxus-related events as youths. Knowles often performed pieces with members of her family, including Loose Pages, Shoes Of Your Choice, and Beans All Day. Knowles lived and worked from her loft in New York City's SoHo district, where she was a resident beginning in the 1950s. She died in New York on October 29, 2025, at the age of 92.