I cocurated this exhibition at Audio Visual Arts on New York’s Lower East Side with the gallery’s founder and director, Justin Luke. The show presented a selection of archived audio from the groundbreaking artist Christopher Knowles’s home-cassette recording projects, several objects from the artist’s personal collection, and a copy of the poster of a selection of Christopher’s tapes that appeared in Esopus 20: Special Collections, whose audio CD featured four of his tape recordings.

Born in New York City, Christopher Knowles has been exhibiting his artwork and participating in readings and performances incorporating his poetry since his teens in the early ’70s. Diagnosed with sustained brain damage as a child from toxoplasmosis, he is perhaps best-known for his text-based “typings,” in which he organizes texts, ranging from lists of top-10 pop songs to single words, into intricate red, black, or green patterns using an electric typewriter. Knowles has also created a significant amount of tape recordings consisting of rhythmically, mathematically, and visually organized poems, often involving repeated variations on a word or phrase.