Alison Knowles’s career as an artist predated the women’s movement. In retrospect, she and others have identified a feminist impulse in her early work with making and serving food. But her sense of herself as a woman artist, who might seek out collaborations and solidarities with other women, emerged after teaching at CalArts in the early 1970s, where Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro developed the Feminist Art Program, site of the Womanhouse project alluded to here. As Knowles recalled later in an interview with her former student Aviva Rahmani, Knowles’s experience at CalArts “forced me to take a harder look at myself and what my own history had been” (Aviva Rahmani, “Alison Knowles: An Interview,” in M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings, Theory, and Criticism, ed. Susan Bee and Mira Schor [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000], 364).
© Alison Knowles. Image courtesy of California Institute of the Arts Institute Archives.
