Today’s post was written by library student assistant Judite do Bem Sampaio. Judite is an international student from Portugal double-majoring in economics and entrepreneurship.
The fourth Faculty Pub Night of the 2025–26 season spotlighted visiting professor of art history Nicole L. Woods and her forthcoming book, “Performing Chance: The Art of Alison Knowles In/Out of Fluxus.” This was Woods’s first public event for the book and, as she shared with us, it also doubled as an emotional tribute: Knowles passed away last month at age 92, just as the book and a major retrospective of her work are traveling the world.
Woods began by situating Alison Knowles as a pioneering but long-underrecognized cofounder of Fluxus, the experimental, international network of artists, musicians, and poets emerging in the early 1960s. Knowles started as an abstract painter, but quickly moved into performance, sound art, installation, and what Woods calls “visual poetry,” works that blend text, image, and everyday life.
Drawing on twenty years of studio visits, interviews, and archival research, Woods described three major phases of Knowles’s practice: her early print and painting experiments; her Fluxus performances (including newspaper pieces and the now-famous “Make a Salad”); and her ambitious environmental works like “The Big Book” and “The House of Dust,” which turned “the book” into a walk-in space of sound, text, and objects.
One of the most compelling parts of the evening was hearing how deeply collaborative Knowles’s world was. She constantly worked with composers like John Cage, fellow Fluxus artists, and later, her own students at CalArts. Woods traced how a computer-generated poem in the 1960s, written in Fortran, became the basis for “The House of Dust,” a fiberglass structure first installed in New York and later reimagined as a social, teaching, and performance space at CalArts, complete with student concerts, readings, and even a helicopter “poem drop.”
Audience members clearly felt both the historical depth and the personal warmth of Woods’s talk. One longtime staff member told me, “I’ve been to most of the Pub Nights since I was a staff member here… I thought it was great. She covered so much more than I expected. It was quite a long, rich summary of the book.” Another attendee, who rarely gets to campus events because of childcare, shared that it was “a fantastic, fascinating book discussion,” adding, “My problem is I can’t get to these things very often because I have a kid and I’m usually on pickup duty, but it’s really nice to be able to participate.”
A faculty colleague who studied with Woods in graduate school reflected on seeing her connect with a broad audience: “Everything she just did confirms for me that she’s such a good teacher.” As someone who doesn’t study art, I felt the same way. I came in knowing almost nothing about Fluxus or Alison Knowles, and left feeling like I could actually follow the works and the ideas behind them.
This Pub Night would have especially appealed to students in art history, studio arts, theatre, music, and anyone curious about how experimental art intersects with feminism, technology, teaching, and politics. For me, the biggest takeaway was how Knowles – and Woods, in writing about her – insist that art can be collaborative, playful, and intellectually rigorous all at once, and that the most meaningful work often lives in the fleeting moments we create with other people.