Walk barefoot through beans at the Grey

The Grey Art Museum’s retrospective, “by Alison Knowles: A Retrospective (1960–2022)”, was curated by Karen Moss. It brings together around 200 works across six decades of performance, printmaking, sound and artist’s books by one of the founding members of Fluxus, the experimental international network that treated everyday life as art.

It is a hands-on show. The reviewer for Washington Square News writes of being surprised to take off their shoes and walk through a pile of beans, a gesture that suits an artist whose work depended on audience participation. Knowles turned actions such as dipping toes in sand and making a salad into performances anyone could try.

The most famous piece is The Identical Lunch: for two years she ordered the same tuna fish sandwich, buttermilk and soup at a Chelsea diner each day, and documented it with photographs, notes and receipts. The review sees the same warmth in the orange screen prints of friends and family. Knowles’s photographs, recordings and drawings, it says, make the museum feel like an adult playground.