Lunch as Art, Alison Knowles Gets Her Due at the Grey
A Fluxus founder who made art from beans, salad and a tuna sandwich gets a full survey in the city she worked in
The order never changed. The Grey Art Museum spells it out as "a tuna fish sandwich on wheat toast with butter and lettuce, no mayo, and a cup of soup or glass of buttermilk." Alison Knowles ate it again and again at a diner in Chelsea, and then she turned it into a work of art. She called it The Identical Lunch.
That sandwich is now part of a museum show. The retrospective, titled by Alison Knowles and covering the years 1960 to 2022, opened at NYU's Grey Art Museum at 18 Cooper Square on September 9 and runs through January 30, 2027. The museum calls it the first comprehensive survey of the artist, who died in 2025. It gathers roughly two hundred objects from a career that lasted more than six decades.
It is also a homecoming. Knowles kept studios in Chelsea and SoHo and was a central figure in the Downtown art scene. The show began at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in 2022 and then traveled to Wiesbaden, Saint-Étienne and Copenhagen. The Grey is its last stop, and its only one on the East Coast.
The Woman in the Room
Knowles is often introduced with a single fact. She was the only woman among the founding members of Fluxus, the loose international circle of experimental artists that took shape in the early 1960s. The Grey wants to move past that line. Its stated aim is to bring the attention back to the work she made on her own.
That work is hard to pin down, and that is the point. She moved between painting, screen printing, performance, sound, sculpture and books, often at the same time. Her husband and collaborator, Dick Higgins, gave that way of working a name in 1966. He called it intermedia.
The first galleries run in order from the late 1950s into the early 1970s, the years when Knowles was part of Fluxus while also building a practice of her own. Among the early works is Taxis and Busses, a large canvas from around 1959 and 1960 that combines oil paint with screen print. Bean Rolls, from 1963 and 1964, is a tin can filled with beans and labeled paper scrolls held with rubber bands, and it went into a 1965 Fluxkit. The later rooms are grouped by material. There are prints, assemblages, scrolls, instruments made from flax, and artist's books.
Cooking, eating and walking were things you could frame and hand to an audience.
The museum also poses a question in its own text. How do you mount a retrospective of an artist whose work so often happened live, in materials that were never meant to last? Its answer is to lean on photographs, recordings, ephemera and reproductions, so the actions still come through when the objects are gone.
Take Your Shoes Off
This is not a show you only look at. Washington Square News, the NYU student paper, reported that visitors are invited to take off their shoes and walk into Bean Garden, a pit of stone beans with a microphone underneath that amplifies each step. The reviewer, fine arts editor Rhea Kohli, never expected to go barefoot through beans at a museum, and then did.
The same review describes a video in which Knowles dresses her daughter, Jessica Higgins, in pieces of handmade paper, with the sound of the paper crackling as the outfit takes shape. Another screen shows clips of Make a Salad, a piece The Art Newspaper dates to 1962. In the clip the student critic describes, Knowles makes lunch for around 1,900 people. According to Washington Square News, she throws lettuce, tomatoes and vinaigrette off a bridge onto a giant tarp, and the crowd below tosses the salad with outsized spatulas.
It is funny. It is also serious. Knowles treated ordinary acts as material, the way a painter treats pigment. Cooking, eating and walking were things you could frame and hand to an audience.
The Identical Lunch appears as a series of screen prints on canvas that show friends and collaborators with the same meal. One of them is titled George Maciunas Performs The Identical Lunch, made in 1968 and 1969 and realized in 1992. The Grey notes that the lunch kept going for decades. From 1969 until Knowles died, artists, friends and people she had never met shared versions of it with her in the United States and abroad, then wrote up what happened.
Lunch Is Served
The work was made to be done, not only seen, and the Grey has scheduled ways to do it. A free exhibition walkthrough is set for Wednesday, October 21 at 6 p.m. On Thursday, November 12, at noon, the museum will host a free lunchtime conversation about The Identical Lunch at 20 Cooper Square, with registration required. Those who attend will be served the signature meal, and vegan versions will be offered.
The galleries hold other invitations too. The museum's materials include a 1971 photograph of students gathered at The House of Dust at CalArts. There is Iliad Oddities (Greene Street), a nine foot long piece from 2010 that pairs found objects with cyanotype on cloth and takes its name from a SoHo street.
We have written about performances that live only in memory, and Knowles spent a career making exactly that kind of work. This show is a way of giving it a room.
According to Washington Square News, the exhibition is free for NYU students, faculty and staff. The Grey's exhibition page has details for everyone else. Take your shoes off. Then walk out onto Cooper Square, order a tuna sandwich somewhere, exactly the same way, and see how it feels.
