Viewpoints with Christopher Knowles

Viewpoints is The Watermill Center’s year-round conversation series, granting art enthusiasts the opportunity to gather and discuss creative themes vital to the contemporary moment. Viewpoints engages with the community through intriguing dialogue, artist talks, and lectures that span across disciplines. On Thursday, February 9 at 6 p.m., artist Christopher Knowles and art historian Lauren DiGiulio will discuss Knowles’ exhibition “Christopher Knowles/STAND.” The show presents a comprehensive exhibition of the work from the artist’s career from the 1970s through today, including drawings, typings, paintings, sculpture and sound work. The evening will feature a performance by Knowles, followed by a Q&A moderated by DiGiulio.

Christopher Knowles (b. 1959) is an American multidisciplinary artist who works in poetry, painting, sound art, performance, and sculpture. Since the early 1970s, he has remixed visual and sonic material from popular culture to create vibrant new vocabularies that expand understanding of information systems. His work pushes into the gaps between language, sound and the visual image, creating a hybrid, reparative method of communication that blends the concrete and the abstract.

Knowles’s work has been exhibited in many solo and group showings internationally, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, Musée Galliera in Paris, the 2006 Whitney Biennial, and the Tate Modern, London. Beginning in the early 1970s, Knowles collaborated on the creation of a series of theater works staged by the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds under the direction of Robert Wilson. He wrote the libretto for Wilson and Philip Glass’s 1976 opera “Einstein on the Beach.” A book of his typewriter poems, “Typings 1974-1977” was published by Vehicle Editions in 1979. In 2015, the Institute for Contemporary Arts, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia presented a retrospective exhibition of his work titled “Christopher Knowles: In a Word.” His 2012-2015 solo performance “The Sundance Kid Is Beautiful With Christopher Knowles” was presented at the Louvre Museum, the Whitebox Gallery in New York, and the ICA, Philadelphia. His poetry has been published in a variety of magazines and journals, including The New Yorker, The Village Voice, Interview, and Office magazines. Knowles’s two and three-dimensional works are held in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, The Watermill Center and other institutional and private collections. He lives and works in New York City.

Lauren DiGiulio is an art historian, curator, and educator. Her research focuses on contemporary visual art and performance, with a particular emphasis on the way these fields intersect with feminist and queer theory, genre and critical race theory.

The Watermill Center is at 39 Watermill Towd Road, Water Mill. Admission to Viewpoints with Christopher Knowles is free. To reserve, visit watermillcenter.org.