NOTE: Due to flight cancellations in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, Alison Knowles was unable to come to Portland. Morgan Ritter ’11 performed with Hannah Higgins in her stead.

In a rare West Coast performance, celebrated Fluxus artist Alison Knowles and her daughter, art historian Hannah Higgins, present the performance lecture, Fluxus with Tools, in conjunction with the ongoing exhibition, Happy Birthday: A Celebration of Chance and Listening, curated by Mack McFarland for the Feldman Gallery + Project Space to celebrate what would have been John Cage’s 100th birthday. The exhibition features work by Cage and Knowles, among many other artists.

Alison Knowles is a founding member of Fluxus, an art movement greatly influenced by ideas generated in Experimental Composition, a class taught by John Cage at the New School for Social Research in New York in the late 50s. Over the years, Knowles association with Cage included such varied activities as joining the New York Mycological Society with Cage and Dick Higgins, hunting wild mushrooms in New York City, and a decade later, designing and co-editing Cage’s book of visual music scores, Notations.
Author and academic, Hannah Higgins, is the daughter of Knowles and Fluxus artist Dick Higgins. She has published a history of the Fluxus movement, Fluxus Experience, and in 2009, The Grid Book with MIT Press.