Christopher Knowles / STAND

Christopher Knowles is a returning alumni artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores the aural and visual elements of language. His work is heavily featured in The Watermill Center Collection, and he participated in The Watermill Center’s founding International Summer Program in 1992. Now, The Watermill Center presents a comprehensive exhibition of Knowles’s work throughout the South Wing of the main building, covering a broad range of his artistic career from the 1970s through today, including drawings, typings, paintings, sculpture, and sound work. This exhibition is the result of an in-depth two-year examination of Knowles’s vast archive that revealed many new associations, bodies of works, and approaches never presented to the public–providing a unique and highly comprehensive insight into Knowles’s artistic oeuvre. Highlights include groups of work that have never been exhibited publicly–including 1970s typings and paintings–as well as new paintings and sculpture. Christopher Knowles lives and works in New York City. He is represented by Bridget Donahue.

Open during select tours, or by appointment. For more information, call +1 (631) 726-4628, ext. 1001.

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 our 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 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 the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, The Watermill Center, and numerous other institutional and private collections. He lives and works in New York City.

All attendees must be fully vaccinated, and present proof of vaccination during check-in. Those unable to show proof of vaccination will be turned away. For the foreseeable future, unvaccinated children are unable to attend. Masks are required indoors.

Please arrive 10 minutes early to allow for the check-in process.

The Watermill Center is committed to providing accessible programs and services for all patrons and artists with disabilities. Please contact us at info@watermillcenter.org for any special accommodations or needs.