Alison Knowles and Our Art Historical Debt to Women of the Avant-Garde
- Jo Leuenberger
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
Jo Leuenberger
Alison Knowles, the luminary artist and founding member of Fluxus, has died. Known perennially as the First Woman of Fluxus, Knowles was the last living original member of Fluxus. She was also the only woman. Despite her artistic and infrastructural necessity to the success of early Fluxus, until recently, Knowles has escaped notice by mainstream art criticism. Instead, her significance has been relegated to her relation to more familiar Fluxist names: John Cage, Ray Johnson, and her husband Dick Higgins. Much of this erasure has been attributed to Knowles’ gender within a male-dominated art movement. So what does it mean to be a woman of the avant-garde? What does it mean to be socially divided in art movements that aim to shirk material and social divisions entirely?
Fluxus emerged in the 1960s in response to perceived mediatic and philosophical pitfalls in Abstract Expressionism. Largely under the tutelage of experimental composer John Cage, Fluxus members produced performances, objects, poetry, and other art forms. The highly experimental and collaborative nature of their work made the movement’s focus and roster highly nebulous, reinforcing art historian Dorothee Richter’s contention that, ‘hardly any other art movement is as difficult to define’ (Richter, 2021). Though Knowles is less famous than many of her peers, her contributions to the movement remain significant. Take, for example, her 1966 work, Big Book, an eight-foot-tall book, replete with a cover and pages that audiences could walk through. Combining architectural, literary, and performance elements, it embodied Fluxist principles of intermedia—a term coined by Higgins to describe ‘fused’ states of interdisciplinarity.
By the late 1960s, second-wave feminism had bled into the experimental arts scene. Writing concurrently with the height of Fluxus’ activity, Anglo-American art historian Lawrence Alloway, considered feminist art a central vanguard of the avant-garde. In 1976 he declared in Art in America: ‘The women’s movement in art can be described as avantgarde, since its protagonists are united in pushing for a change in the existing social order within the art world.’ But Alloway’s position was countered, somewhat unconvincingly, by the ahistorical position of the Fluxists. They saw themselves as doing away with social and mediatic divisions entirely. Group work, a central tenet of many Fluxists works, allowed artists to conflate the social with the mediatic, displacing both the hierarchy of specialised media and the individual artist. But it also had the byproduct of taping over cracks in Fluxist methodology. Try as they may to obscure social divisions, most Fluxus members remained educated white men from economically privileged backgrounds. Those who did not fit into this multi-hyphenate category usually only fell out of it—Knowles included.
If Fluxus was so divisionless, then where were all the women? They were there, just less visible. After all, Fluxus was more diverse than previous prominent art movements originating in Europe and America. In fact, Fluxus was characterised as much by its intermedia as well as its internationality. It set the stage for the careers of Nam June Paik, Shigeko Kubota, and its most famous member—though not necessarily for Fluxist reasons—Yoko Ono. Fluxus signalled a globalising art world where East Asian artists were growing prominently in Western markets and discourses. It also indicated an art world with women artists in traditionally patriarchal realms. Though white men remained the majority, Fluxus was comparatively inclusive of women, Black, and Asian artists, many of whom are now better known than Fluxus.
Why then, the absence of Fluxist women in scholarship and exhibitions? Much of this problem lies not with Fluxus, but with art history itself. For women of the avant-garde, art historians have struggled to place their work in the social and artistic milieu of the 1970s. This is especially true of those, like Knowles, whose work lacked easily identifiable feminist ambitions and actively resisted being read from sociopolitical vantages. Therefore, much of the issue has been ironically the difficulty of categorising women artists like Knowles who thwarted categorisation.
Until recently, the art historical response has largely been to condense experimental women artists to their relationships with prominent male peers, especially their husbands. Indeed, Knowles’ work was often compared to Higgins’ and her career rendered a complement to his. Even Knowles’ infamous styling as either the First Woman or First Lady of Fluxus relegates her to a support role entangled in her marital status. Lee Krasner, wife of Jackson Pollock, is one glaring example, as is Ono, best-known today as John Lennon’s widow. Even the Impressionist Berthe Morisot is frequently studied through her association with Édouard Manet, a connection some historians assume was romantic. In the history of the avant-garde, women have been viewed as romantic accessories before being viewed as artists.
Even if these artists did not produce feminist work, the recovery and inclusion of women artists in art history is a feminist act. When extrapolated to intersectionalities, it can also be decolonial, anti-racist, pro-LGBTQ, and anti-classist. While in recent decades springs of art history have moved towards more inclusive scholarship, women of the avant-garde continue to be overlooked. This is especially the case for those whose works exist outside of political categorisation. But the inclusion of marginalised people who do not identify as activists is just as central to the success of this methodology. The sheer existence of these artists in these spaces is, in itself, radical.
In the last decade of her life, Knowles finally got her comeuppance. Despite early successes—she won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1968 (Guggenheim Fellowship, 2025)—Knowles’ work remained underexamined until 2015. That year, she was selected by Claire Bishop to receive the Francis J. Greenburger Award, which honours ‘under-recognised artists every two years’ (Greenberger, 2015). She was also the subject of a retrospective by the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) in 2022 (Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 2022). This reoriented attention is promising. But art history still struggles to configure Knowles’ place among her Fluxist peers. For now, she remains largely the privy of a feminist niche, a figure on the Fluxist periphery—ever-present, but overlooked.
Sources
Guggenheim Fellowship. (2025). Explore Fellows. https://www.gf.org/fellows/alison-knowles
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. (2022). by Alison Knowles: A Retrospective
Greenberger, A. (2015). Collector’s Corner: Francis Greenburger. ArtNews.
Olch Richards, J. (2010). Oral history interview with Alison Knowles, 2010 June 1-2.
Smithsonian Institute. https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-intervi
ew-alison-knowles-15822
Richter, D. (2021). FluxUsNow. OnCurating, Issue 51 (September 2021), 6-24.
ating_51_WEB.pdf
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