CalArts mourns the passing of one of our original faculty members and pioneering artist Alison Knowles, who died on Oct. 29 in New York at age 92.
Knowles was a central figure in the emergence of Fluxus in the 1960s—an international network of artists, composers, and designers whose experimental work blurred boundaries between media and encouraged participation, play, and chance. Her practice transformed everyday actions into art, using materials as ordinary as dried beans, shells, netting, and tunafish.
“I want my work to expand the terms of engagement,” she told The New York Times in 2022. “I don’t want people looking passively at my work but actively participating by touching, eating, following an instruction about listening, physically making or taking something, or joining in an activity.”
That philosophy shaped some of her most celebrated works, including Make a Salad (1962), in which performers create a salad of any scale or ingredients, with the act unfolding as the artwork. The piece has been interpreted in museums and public spaces around the world—including Art Basel in Switzerland and London’s Tate Modern—but can also be performed at home.
Knowles is embedded in CalArts’ earliest history. Recruited in the late 1960s by founding faculty member Allan Kaprow, she joined a cohort that included Nam June Paik, Dick Higgins, Emmett Williams, and composer James Tenney. Their interdisciplinary approach helped shape the Institute’s identity. As Knowles recalled in a 2011 interview in East of Borneo—a publication born from CalArts’ School of Art—“Kaprow had the vision of a school based on what artists wanted to do rather than what the school wanted them to do.”
Her iconic collaboration with Tenney, House of Dust, began in 1967 as a computer-generated poem written using the Fortran programming language—widely considered one of the first computer-generated poems. A sculptural version of the work was later installed on the CalArts campus, serving as a site for classes, readings, and performances. In 2011, Knowles read from House of Dust at the White House during An Evening of Poetry hosted by President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama.
Her influence continued at CalArts long after her tenure here. The 2018 Reframing the House of Dust project invited students, faculty, and international collaborators to create a new social sculpture on campus, reaffirming the work’s ongoing relevance to architecture, social space, and collective making. Knowles herself returned to campus to observe, celebrate, and participate.
“Like many Fluxus artists, Alison was a gifted educator,” said faculty member Janet Sarbanes, who helped organize the 2018 project along with Critical Studies colleague Ken Ehrlich and French curators Maude Jaquin and Sebastien Pluot. “When we asked her which of the three student designs should be built on campus, she asked, ‘Why not all three?” At every turn, her instinct was toward generosity, abundance, and continuous creativity. Working with Alison felt like a reactivation of CalArts’ original DNA—its interdisciplinary, collaborative, and improvisational beginnings. When she came to campus for the performance program that took place in and around our funky little structure, she told me it had a real Fluxus feel, which was a great honor!”
Knowles’ legacy lives on in generations of artists who expand what art can be—participatory, communal, humorous, and deeply human.
