Alison Knowles, pioneering experimental artist and a founding member of Fluxus, died on 29 October, her gallery, James Fuentes, has announced.
Born in Scarsdale, New York, Alison Knowles graduated with a degree in Fine Arts from Pratt Institute in 1956. In New York, she joined the Mycological Society founded by John Cage, who became a close friend and creative influence. In 1962 in Düsseldorf, she took part in the first Fluxus performance alongside Cage, George Maciunas, Nam June Paik, Dick Higgins – who later became her husband – and others.
Knowles’s work explored performance, everyday gestures and audience participation and often included food. One of her best-known pieces is an event score which instructs how to Make a Salad, first performed by Knowles at the ICA in London in 1962. Throughout her career, she produced over a hundred event scores that blurred the lines between performance and the everyday, including Nivea Cream Piece (1962), Newspaper Music (1962) and The Identical Lunch (1967).
Her practice also experimented with sound, text and sculpture. Bean Rolls (1963) takes the form of a ‘canned book’: a tin can filled with rolled up texts and dried beans that add a musical component. Her 1967 work The House of Dust, created with James Tenney, is widely regarded as one of the first computer-generated poems.
Knowles was the subject of several solo shows later in her career, including at the Carnegie Museum of Art (2016) and the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive (2022–23).
The House of Dust will be on view this autumn in New York as part of the inaugural exhibition in the New Museum’s building expansion.
