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The fourth Faculty Pub Night of the 2025-26 season features Nicole Woods, visiting professor of art history (College of Communication and Fine Arts). She will discuss her upcoming publication, "Performing Chance: The Art of Alison Knowles In/Out of Fluxus."

About Faculty Pub Night

Students, staff, faculty, alumni, and members of the public are all invited to the 2025-26 series of Faculty Pub Night at the William H. Hannon Library. Eight LMU professors are selected annually to discuss their latest publication or project in a comfortable setting and format that welcomes diverse perspectives for an inclusive conversation aimed to educate the entire community. All Faculty Pub Nights are free and open to the public.

About the Author's Work

This book is the first historical study of American artist Alison Knowles, a significant yet overlooked cofounder of the international, interdisciplinary Fluxus movement in the early 1960s. The sole female practitioner among the artists, musicians, and poets of Fluxus, she has nevertheless remained an enigmatic, underrecognized figure in the history of art. "Performing Chance" fills a gap in the record, bringing to light Knowles’s transformative body of work as it evolved from abstract painting in the late 1950s, to silkscreens, print media, and performance in the early 1960s, to groundbreaking works in digital poetry, musical composition, acoustical art, and large-scale installations in the late 1960s-70s.

Through her access to previously unpublished archival materials and direct interviews with the artist, Woods provides close readings of pivotal works, disclosing the ways Knowles instituted formal tactics that moved beyond modernist painting, championed principles of indeterminacy and chance, and fostered sociopolitical consciousness. Situating Knowles’s innovations in various media within the distinct cultural contexts of Wiesbaden, London, Paris, New York City, and Los Angeles, "Performing Chance" brings this key artist back to her rightful place as a leader of the postwar avant-garde and provides a nuanced history of the role of women artists in Fluxus and beyond.

About the Author

Nicole L. Woods is an art historian of modern and contemporary art in the College of Communication and Fine Arts at Loyola Marymount University. Her research focuses on the Euro-American neo-avant-gardes, performance and conceptual art, intersectional feminism, critical theory, globalism and taste cultures, and the history of photography and time-based media. In addition to her monograph on pioneering American artist, Alison Knowles, Woods is the scholarly consultant for the first museum survey of her life and work, "by Alison Knowles: A Retrospective, 1960-2022," which debuted at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in 2022 and is now on its European tour through 2026. The exhibition catalogue, of which she was the lead author, has won design and “best art book” awards. 

Her research has also been generously supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts (Arts Writers Grant); The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; The Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA), National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Chicago, IL; and the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, University of Notre Dame. Before joining LMU, she taught at the University of Notre Dame and the University of California, Irvine.

About the William H. Hannon Library

The William H. Hannon Library fosters excellence in academic achievement through an array of distinctive services that enable learners to feed their curiosity, experience new worlds, develop their ideas, inform their decision-making, and inspire others. More information can be found at http://library.lmu.edu

For more information about this event, contact the Outreach and Engagement team at the William H. Hannon library via email at library.outreach@lmu.edu or call 310-338-5234.