by Alison Knowles: A Retrospective (1960–2022)

In the 1960s, as artists were struggling to break free of abstract painting, Alison Knowles made a salad in front of an audience and turned it into a sound piece. She ordered the same tuna sandwich at a Chelsea diner for a year and called that art, too.

Most of what’s at the Grey comes from those events: photographs, scores, videos, and a timeline that puts Knowles in the middle of the Conceptual art movement with a capital C. This makes the show feel a little meta at first. Then everything starts moving.

In the second room, a printer is still churning out her computer-generated poem, The House of Dust (1967), on the original machine. Nearby, a video shows pages of the poem fluttering from a helicopter into an impossibly blue California sky. Imagine walking underneath without knowing it was art.

If you had been there, you could also have walked into the House of Dust itself, an amoeba-shaped dome where she hosted gatherings. In the vitrine beside the poem generator are tiny sculptures people made and exchanged during one of those gatherings. Gorgeous and sweet.

There’s also a re-creation of Bean Garden (1975), a sandbox you can step into, filled with beans and wired with speakers. Every shuffle makes a reverberating sound. It’s also an intense foot massage.

Suddenly, everything looks like material. And looking at art seems like the least interesting thing you can do with it.

Alison Knowles (b. New York City, 1933, and d. New York City, 2025) was a founding member of Fluxus and the only woman among its members. She lived and worked on Spring Street in SoHo for decades and collaborated with artists, musicians, and writers of the downtown New York scene. Her work moved easily between performance, sound, sculpture, printmaking, poetry, installation, and artist’s books, turning ordinary actions into art you could see, hear, touch, and taste.