Christopher Knowles (poet)
Template:Short description Template:About Template:Infobox person Christopher Knowles (born 1959)<ref>Christopher Knowles Template:Webarchive, profile at Gavin Brown's Enterprise</ref> is an American poet and painter. He was born in New York City on May 4, 1959, and at an early age received a diagnosis of possible brain damage. He is often referred to as autistic.<ref name=EK>"Ars Longa: Encore" (The Poetry of Christopher Knowles) by Eric Konigsberg, The New Yorker, April 15, 2013 Template:Subscription required</ref> In 1976, his poetry was used by Robert Wilson for the avant-garde minimalist Philip Glass opera, Einstein on the Beach.<ref>The Andy Warhol Diaries, p. 294, Template:ISBN</ref> Wilson described his discovery of the then 13-year-old Knowles, in the extended notes to the Tomato Records release of Einstein on the Beach:Template:Blockquote Wilson cast the teenager Knowles in a number of his productions, including Einstein on the Beach.<ref name=EK />
In 1978, the American poet John Ashbery wrote in the magazine New York of a volume of Knowles's poetry:Template:Blockquote
Early in 2013, Knowles presented several of his poems in a reading at Gavin Brown's Enterprise in the West Village which had mounted an exhibition of his paintings. The same year, the Museum of Modern Art acquired several of Knowles' paintings, or rather "typings" or "typed designs" – pictures created with a typewriter and using colored ink to make patterns from letters and numbers. He starts creating the pictures by writing his signature and works his way up and to the left. Knowles said, he paints all the reds, then all the blues, and so on. One of his pictures consists only of the words "John Simon pollute your anger", inspired by the art critic's dismissive treatment of Robert Wilson (Simon had described Wilson as a charlatan and accused him of exploiting Knowles).
In 2015, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia staged "Christopher Knowles: In A Word"—solo exhibition of work spanning Knowles' career.<ref name="ica">Template:Cite web</ref> The exhibition traveled to the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston in 2017.<ref name="houston">Template:Cite web</ref>
Collections
- NoguerasBlanchard, Madrid / Barcelona, SP
- Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, USA
- Fogg Museum, Cambridge, USA
- Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam, NL
- Museum Ludwig (Dr. Peter Ludwig), Cologne, DE
- Museum of Modern Art, New York, US