Christopher Knowles (poet)


Christopher Knowles 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. In 1976, his poetry was used by Robert Wilson for the avant-garde minimalist Philip Glass opera, Einstein on the Beach. 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:
Wilson cast the teenager Knowles in a number of his productions, including Einstein on the Beach.
In 1978, the American poet John Ashbery wrote in the magazine New York of a volume of Knowles's poetry:
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.
In 2015, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia staged "Christopher Knowles: In A Word"—solo exhibition of work spanning Knowles' career. The exhibition traveled to the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston in 2017.

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