Department of Art History

Nicole L. Woods will be in conversation about her book Performing Chance: The Art of Alison Knowles In/Out of Fluxus (University of Chicago Press) with Christine Mehring. The Q&A will be followed by a performance of one of Alison Knowles’ works. Woods is a Los Angeles-based art historian and critics and Distinguished Visiting Professor at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles. 

Performing Chance is the first monographic study of American artist Alison Knowles, who stands out as the sole female artist among the founders of the Fluxus movement, yet has remained an enigmatic, underrecognized figure in the history of art. Performing Chance fills a gap in the record, bringing to light Knowles’s transformative body of work as it evolved from abstract painting in the late 1950s, to silkscreens, print media, and performance in the early 1960s, to groundbreaking works in digital poetry, acoustical art, and large-scale installations in the late 1960s-70s.

Through her access to previously unpublished archival materials and direct interviews with the artist, Woods provides close readings of pivotal works, disclosing the ways Knowles instituted formal tactics that moved beyond modernist painting, championed principles of indeterminacy and chance, and fostered sociopolitical consciousness. Situating Knowles’s innovations in various media within the distinct cultural contexts of Wiesbaden, London, Paris, New York City, and Los Angeles, Performing Chance brings this key artist back to her rightful place as a leader of the postwar avant-garde and provides a nuanced history of the role of women artists in Fluxus and beyond.