by Alison Knowles: A Retrospective (1960–2022)

Organized by the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA)

Best known as a core member of Fluxus, the avant-garde art group founded in 1962, Alison Knowles (1933–2025) created groundbreaking experiments that have influenced contemporary art for over fifty years. Organized by the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) and curated by Karen Moss, by Alison Knowles: A Retrospective (1960–2022) is the first comprehensive exhibition of the artist’s work, spanning the entire breadth of her career, from her intermedia works of the 1960s to her participatory and relational art from the 2000s. Knowles’s poetic artworks—including prints, sculptures and installations, sound compositions, paper scrolls, and artists’ books—emerged from her extended engagement with ordinary materials, found objects, and everyday life. Following the exhibition’s extensive international tour, the Grey Art Museum at New York University is the last, and only East Coast, venue. By Alison Knowles is accompanied by a generously illustrated 250-page exhibition catalogue co-published by BAMPFA and D.A.P., the first comprehensive book on Knowles’s work to be published by a museum.

Curator

The exhibition is curated by Karen Moss.

Tour

Following its original run at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive from July 20, 2022 to February 12, 2023, the exhibition embarked on an extensive 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; and Nikolaj Kunstahal, Copenhagen: April 25–July 26, 2026. The Grey Art Museum at New York University is the last, and only East Coast, venue.