Alison Knowles: Performance Drawings

Performance Drawings was a series of five short solo exhibitions, taking place in The Drawing Center's Drawing Room. The series presented the work of artists engaged in exploring the intersection between drawing and performance. Several of the performances encouraged audience interaction and the series as a whole offered a unique opportunity to encounter process-oriented and multi-disciplinary works.

Artist Alison Knowles worked in New York and was a founding member of the interdisciplinary and experimental Fluxus movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Knowles was interested in sound and poetry, and made sound instruments out of paper, often by inserting beans between sheets during the papermaking process. In her performances at The Drawing Center, Knowles played these objects, including her work the Bean Turner, which was then displayed during the rest of her exhibition. She also performed "Loose Pages," where she slowly covered a performer in a suit made out of paper. Knowles was a veteran of innovation in the areas of performance, poetry, and paperworking, and produced the majority of the works in her exhibition in collaboration with Dieu Donné Papermill.

To accompany Performance Drawings, The Drawing Center published Drawing Papers 21, which included an introduction by The Drawing Center Director, Catherine de Zegher, alongside essays by Elizabeth Finch and Tom McDonough. Also included were texts and projects by the artists, and a selection of black-and-white illustrations of the artists' works.