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\t\tAlison Knowles,\u00a0\u201cMusic by Alison,\u201d performed during Fully Guaranteed 12 Fluxus Concerts, New York on May 23, 1964, gelatin silver print (\u00a9 Alison Knowles; photo courtesy Hannah Higgins)<\/p>\n
Knowles was born in the Westchester suburb of Scarsdale, New York, in 1933. She attended Middlebury College in Vermont before transferring to the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, studying under painter Richard Lindner and abstract expressionist Adolph Gottlieb, as well as Color Field pioneer Josef Albers during a summer course at Syracuse University.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In New York in the 1950s, she found herself dabbling in all arenas of contemporary and experimental art. She both attended and performed in Allan Kaprow\u2019s \u201cHappenings.\u201d She joined the New York Mycological Society, where she met luminaries like composer John Cage and artist, historian, and organizer George Maciunas. Along with those two, she was a founding member of the Fluxus movement, participating in its first performance in 1962 alongside artists like Nam June Paik as the only woman in the group.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\t\tNewspaper clipping depicting Alison Knowles performing \u201cThe Big Book\u201d (1967) (photo courtesy Hannah Higgins)<\/p>\n
Knowles married fellow Fluxus artist Dick Higgins in 1960, with whom she had twin daughters Hannah and Jessica, described in a 2002 interview<\/a> as \u201cmy sisters as well as my children.\u201d In 1963, the pair founded Something Else Press, which published intermedia book art meant to be broadly accessible. There, she would design and co-edit John Cage\u2019s Notations<\/a> (1969), a book of music manuscripts. (She and Higgins divorced in 1970.)<\/p>\n \t\tAlison Knowles (center) performing \u201cMake a salad\u201d at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, on October 24, 1962 (photo courtesy Hannah Higgins)<\/p>\n She continued to experiment with the form in individual works, such as large-scale installations like \u201cThe Boat Book\u201d (1979), in which \u201creaders\u201d could walk through pages, and works like \u201cBean Rolls\u201d (1963) \u2014 a favored material for their affordability and universality \u2014\u00a0which reconstituted everyday items into books. She turned pages into instruments and worked with master papermaker Coco Gordon to create a book in which sections correspond to parts of the body (Loose Pages, 1983).<\/p>\n Knowles took up Event Scores, the participatory performance form devised by George Brecht, and would go on to produce more than 100 of these works. Among her most iconic are \u201cMake a Salad\u201d (1962), \u201cThe Identical Lunch\u201d (1960), and \u201cNewspaper Music\u201d (1962). The first, originally conceived at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, consists only of its title directive, leaning on performers to interpret and enact it. <\/p>\n \u201cIt was our own way of scoring our actions or performances in a manner as serious as a score by Satie,\u201d she told the New York Times in 2022<\/a>. \u201cA sentence like \u2018Make a salad,\u2019 that\u2019s the event score.\u201d<\/p>\n She was also credited for co-creating what is now considered one of the world\u2019s first computer-generated poems with composer James Tenney. \u201cThe House of Dust\u201d (1967), made in an early programming language on an IBM computer, will be restaged as part of the New Museum\u2019s inaugural exhibition for its reopening<\/a>.<\/p>\n Her work is held in major collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, as well as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Tate Modern in London, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/4xbNp.jpeg\")
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<\/a>Alison Knowles, \u201cThe House of Dust\u201d (1967\/2021) (photo by Wolfgang G\u00fcnzel via Wikimedia Commons<\/a>, CC BY-SA 4.0<\/a>)<\/p>\n