by Alison Knowles: A Retrospective (1960–2022)

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

by Alison Knowles: A Retrospective (1960–2022) is the first comprehensive survey of work by American artist Alison Knowles (1933–2025), whose career spanned more than six decades. Based in New York, she maintained studios in Chelsea and SoHo and became central to the Downtown artistic community. While Knowles is often recognized as the only woman who was a founding member of Fluxus—an international community of experimental artists formed in the early 1960s—this exhibition refocuses attention on her pioneering individual production. 

Knowles’s art consistently invites audiences to explore daily life through simple actions and experiences that activate their sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch. Rather than moving from one fixed practice to the next, she immersed herself in diverse materials and subjects simultaneously. Combining elements of visual art, musical scores, and live performance in her work, Knowles moved fluidly between genres—a practice termed “intermedia” by her husband and artistic collaborator Dick Higgins in 1966. Honoring this legacy, the exhibition features more than two hundred objects highlighting her innovations across painting and mixed-media prints, event scores and performance, sculpture and installation, sound work, and artist’s books.

The first part of the installation is organized chronologically, from the late 1950s to the early 1970s—the pivotal years in which Knowles worked within Fluxus but also developed her own intermedia practice. The remaining galleries present her work by medium and material: printmaking, assemblage, installations, scrolls, flax instruments, and artist’s books. Specific sections are also devoted to the collaborative exhibitions and events of Knowles’s final years, including recent activations of her earliest event scores. Positioned within the longer arc of her creative practice, these works reveal the recursive, iterative strands that defined her work for decades.

What does it mean to build a retrospective for an underexamined woman artist whose work depends on impermanent materials and live performance? Such practices resist easy categorization and do not fit neatly within standard museum conventions. Here, Knowles’s artworks, along with ephemera, photographs, recordings, and photoreproductions, create a more complete picture of her artistic output. by Alison Knowles offers audiences the opportunity to encounter the full range and reach of Knowles’s art, and to take up its standing invitation to participate.

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.