31/12/2025
In Memoriam
As 2025 draws to a close, we would like to share our memories of Alison Knowles (1933–2025), with true admiration for her inspirational legacy as a co-founder of Fluxus and decades-long artistic practice. May her kindness and generosity live on throughout time. We were honored to curate and present Beans All Day, on November 12, 2011 at Forever & Today’s New York City storefront exhibition space, featured in the Performa 11 New Visual Art Performance Biennial’s Fluxus Weekend. Alison and her family “gifted” multitudes of guests and curious passersby that day with an incredibly special shared experience to be fondly remembered.
As part of Beans All Day, we interviewed Alison over tea at home in her Soho loft, published in Performa Magazine: https://performamagazine.tumblr.com/post/12642141632/alison-knowles-an-interview-with-the-seminal
Our curatorial text subsequently appeared in Performa 11: Staging Ideas catalogue:
Alison Knowles, with Jessica Higgins, Joshua Selman, and Clara Selman
Beans All Day
Forever & Today / Curated by Ingrid Pui Yee Chu and Savannah Gorton
Spilling out of Forever & Today’s tiny storefront at the nexus of Canal, Ludlow, and Division Streets in Chinatown and onto the bustling sidewalk, three generations of Fluxus artist Alison Knowles’s family–Knowles herself; her daughter, performer Jessica Higgins, and son-in-law sonic artist Joshua Selman; as well as her granddaughter, Clara Selman–performed together for the first time. The daylong affair featured performance scores, sound, poetry, artist books, a free limited-edition bookmark by Knowles, and food–with beans of all kinds as the primary material of these actions and objects.
Appreciating beans’ aptitude for both artistic and physical nourishment, Knowles has used dried legumes in her work since the 1960s, in such works as Rice and Beans for Charles Curtis (2008), a musical score written for handmade rice paper, beans, lentils, fabric and string. For Beans All Day, dried legumes were arranged with books on display, as interactive sound instruments, in miniature boxed editions, and also as a savory stovetop dish that was cooked onsite and served to the audience. In Shoes of Your Choice, granddaughter Clara placed her purple Converse sneakers atop a music stand and described why she liked them, accompanied by the sounds of crinkling paper, which could be heard as Knowles performed Loose Pages, dressing daughter Hannah Higgins in handmade flax-paper garments over a white bodysuit. Joshua Selman amplified the sounds with a guitar and amp, using a repurposed fax machine and paper shredder to produce his own abstract musical compositions as well as mountains of shredded paper. Amid the delightful cacophony, Knowles read aloud from a bean-sound poem: “PLICK … TWEEHURR … QWEEHOAROAAUWR …” as all gathered around to listen to the beans “speak.”
–Ingrid Pui Yee Chu and Savannah Gorton
As a non-profit commissioning organization originally co-founded by co-directors and curators Ingrid Pui Yee Chu and Savannah Gorton in New York City in 2008 and housed in a Chinatown/Lower East Side storefront exhibition space, Forever & Today (2008–present) curates art exhibitions, programs, residencies, publications, and editions–continuing today as an international nomadic curatorial office based between Copenhagen and Hong Kong.
Images: Alison Knowles, Beans All Day, courtesy Forever & Today, New York, 2011.
