Published by D.A.P./University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Edited by Karen Moss, Lucia Fabio. Foreword by Julie Rodrigues Widholm. Contributions by Hannah B Higgins, Lucia Fabio, Lauren Fulton, Maud Jacquin and Sébastien Pluot, Nicole L. Woods. Reprinted texts by Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, George Quasha, Julia Robinson, Kristine Stiles.
The American artist Alison Knowles’ (born 1933) groundbreaking experiments—from painting and printmaking to sculpture and installation, sound works, poetry and artist’s books—have influenced art and artists for more than 50 years but remain relatively unknown among mainstream audiences. The first comprehensive volume on the artist, By Alison Knowles: A Retrospective presents more than 200 objects that span the entire breadth of her career, from her intermedia works of the 1960s to forms of participatory and relational art in the 2000s. The accompanying catalog features contributions by international Fluxus curators, historians and scholars, including lead essays by organizer Karen Moss, Hannah B. Higgins and Nicole Woods, and short contributions by co-editor Lucia Fabio, Lauren Fulton, Maud Jacquin and Sébastien Pluot. It also includes reprints of key articles by Benjamin Buchloh, Julia Robinson and Kristine Stiles, as well as a conversation between Alison Knowles and poet George Quasha. Richly illustrated with more than 250 images, the full-color catalog, designed by Kimberly Varella, includes a softcover lay-flat binding, special colored papers for each section, die-cut section dividers and a chronology. The cover of the book is a makeready (press sheets gathered from printing the interior of the book) produced during the printing of the interior pages. Each cover in the edition is unique.
Published by Granary Books. Artwork by Alison Knowles.
Once upon a time [composer] Jim Tenney and I went walking in the woods. We came to a clearing and there under a tree was an arrangement of toy locomotives in the middle of nowhere. Pausing, we mused, where were they going, where had they been? Attempting to write just such an imaginative history of her own life, and its comings and goings, New York artist Alison Knowles has compiled Footnotes--a collection of collage pages made from small, red travel books collected over 30 years, then pasted up and redrawn, in no definite or logical order. The settings of these collages range from Germany to Japan (but always coming back to New York), with a loosely woven context provided by jotted-down ideas and overheard conversations between her friends. These delicate pencil drawings convey a sense of time lost and regained, displacement and reorientation, of the scattered nature of our interior lives.
Alison Knowles: Footnotes