Alison Knowles (1933–2025)

“I think art should take us out of very good times or very bad. It’s a neutral resting place. It’s a place to take a breath. Art should relieve us and enliven us.”

It is with profound sadness and admiration that we commemorate the passing of Alison Knowles. A defining force in postwar experimental art, Knowles’ six-decade career has indelibly transformed the boundaries of art and life as we understand them. She was a founding member of the Fluxus group, whose ethos sought to disassemble traditional barriers between art forms, while rejecting the exclusivity of the art world in favor of art as an open and participatory experience accessible to all. She passed away peacefully at her home in New York City on October 29, 2025.

Knowles was born and raised in Scarsdale, New York in 1933, a small town north of the city. Knowles graduated with a degree in Fine Arts from Pratt Institute in 1956, where she studied under Richard Lindner and Adolph Gottlieb, as well as taking a summer course with Josef Albers at Syracuse University. During these years she also joined the New York Mycological Society, founded by composer John Cage, who became a close friend and creative influence. These early exchanges with peers like Cage and George Maciunas led to the formation of the Fluxus group. The first Fluxus performance took place in 1962 in Düsseldorf, Germany with an assembly of artists who would become central to the movement, including Knowles and Maciunas alongside Nam June Paik, Dieter Roth, Emmett Williams, Ben Patterson, Wolf Vostell, and Dick Higgins (whom she later married); inaugurating the group’s radical integration of chance and collective experimentation in live performance.

During this period, Knowles began working with Event Scores, a form originated by George Brecht, which she adapted and expanded to foreground audience participation, everyday gestures, and the performative potential of non-living materials. While Fluxus privileged collectivity, Knowles’ career embodies a generative paradox: an individual practice inseparable from collective participation and the dynamics of shared experience. Her first Event Score, Make a Salad (1962) presented a kind of concert between the rhythmic chopping of vegetables, musical accompaniment, and a collective gustatory experience, allowing participants to ingest and thus complete the performance. In total, Knowles produced well over a hundred Event Scores—The Identical Lunch (1967), Celebration Red (1962), Newspaper Music (1962–63), Shoes of Your Choice (1963), and Nivea Cream Piece (1962) among the most iconic. An early collection of her Event Scores appears in By Alison Knowles (1965) published by Something Else Press, which she co-founded with Dick Higgins in 1963 to champion intermedia art in book form and make avant-garde and performance-based art accessible to a broad public.

Knowles also broke ground in her experiments that took a collaborative approach with technology—most notably with The House of Dust, conceived in 1967, widely regarded as one of the first computer-generated poems. The work was created in partnership with composer James Tenney, who used an early IBM computer to program Knowles’ lines of poetry into continuous random variations. Each poem describes a set of four lists: houses made of various materials, in a certain location, with a particular light source, and different sets of inhabitants for the structure. In the decades since, numerous structures have been built based on one of the poem's quatrains—one of the best-known being on the grounds of CalArts, where Knowles taught (1970-72) in the Intermedia Program. Other experiments in data translation included her Onion Skin Song (1968), an early example of sonification in art in which she visually mapped the forms of onion skins into a score to be interpreted in live performance.

Knowles experimented often with the sculptural potential of the book form. Large-scale works like The Big Book (1967) and later The Boat Book (1979) envisioned walk-in sculptures that invited viewers to physically move through sculptural ‘pages’ anchored around a central ‘spine.’ Smaller objects such as the Tin Can Piece (1962) and The Bean Rolls (1963) reconceived ordinary tin cans as ‘books,’ containing written scrolls and other objects activated by the viewer’s handling of their contents. One part of the book, the page, informed her ongoing series of Loose Page sculptures begun in 1983. Early iterations, originally created in collaboration with master paper maker Coco Gordon, imagined interactive pages made for parts of the body, with the human spine taking the place of the book’s spine. Since the mid-'90s, Knowles also used paper to produce a series of sounding objects such as her Bean Turners, doubling as both pages and instruments. For these, she enclosed dried beans within stiffened layers of handmade paper. When picked up and inverted, the object produces resonant waves of sound, which she described as the sound of roaring waves and a high wind.

The use of negative space, which became a hallmark of Knowles’ oeuvre, also directly translated into her experiments with sun‑sensitive chemical processes. In many later works, she used light‑sensitive emulsion on fabric or paper to record the silhouetted forms of everyday objects placed directly onto the surface. Throughout her lifetime, Knowles repeatedly anticipated many of the concerns now foundational to contemporary art—from process- and material-based intermedia practices, relational aesthetics, and chance operations, to performance shaped by audience participation, sound art, and a reframing of everyday objects and domestic life as sites of cultural and political meaning. In a 2010 oral history interview for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Knowles’ adventurous spirit and creative generosity are distilled in her observation: “I often think the simplest gesture can carry a lifetime of meaning.”

Knowles’ expansive career is marked by major solo exhibitions including Alison Knowles at the Carnegie Museum of Art (2016) and by Alison Knowles: A Retrospective (1960–2022), originating at the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive (2022–23) and traveling to the Museum Wiesbaden, Germany (2024-25); MAMC+ Saint-Étienne Métropole, France (opening November 8, 2025–March 15, 2026); Nikolaj Kunsthal, Copenhagen (2026); and the Grey Art Museum at New York University (2026). The House of Dust (1967) will be on view as part of the inaugural exhibition in the New Museum’s newly expanded galleries in New York this fall. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Art Institute of Chicago; Brooklyn Museum; Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Fondazione Bonotto, Italy; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Germany; among many others. Her profound contributions to artistic practice were recognized through awards including an Anonymous was a Woman Grant (2003) and College Art Association Lifetime Achievement Award (2003), as well as a Harvard Radcliffe Fellowship (2009-10), Dokumenta Professorship at the Kunstakademie Kassel, Germany (1998), New York State Council on the Arts Grant (1989), NEA Grants (1981, 1985), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1968). She received honorary doctorates from the Pratt Institute (2015), Columbia College Chicago (2009), and Maine College of Art (2002). Knowles’ work has been detailed in major publications including By Alison Knowles: A  Retrospective (1960-2022) (University of California, 2022). Her central role within the Fluxus movement is explored in Fluxus Experience by Hannah Higgins (University of California Press, 2002). Performing Chance: The Art of Alison Knowles In/Out of Fluxus by Nicole L. Woods is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press.