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Alison Knowles’s career as an artist began before the onset of the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s. In retrospect, she and others have identified a feminist impulse in her early work that involved making and serving food. But her sense of herself as a woman artist, one 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. As she recalled later in an interview with 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). When she returned to New York, Knowles became friends with the composer Annea (then Anna) Lockwood, and together they put together Womens Work, a magazine of avant-garde scores written by women artists from around the world. Two issues were published, one in 1975 and another in 1978.