Her first book, Performing Chance: The Art of Alison Knowles In/Out of Fluxus (University of Chicago Press, February 2026), examines the New York-born Fluxus artist’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, acoustical art, and large-scale installations in the late 1960s-70s. In this first monographic study on Knowles, 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—including the work House of Dust, which Knowles brought to CalArts as a faculty member in the early years of the institution. 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.
Woods is currently working on a study of African American painter Bob Thompson, whose short but prolific life as an abstract-figurative painter challenged then-dominant art genres of the 1960s. She recently completed this research as the William Truettner Senior Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
