To outsiders the place looked like a hippie colony, a place full of longhairs and dogs, children running free, and hand-held video cameras recording it all. Inside, it was a place of possibility. Although there were recognizable classes, the motivating idea was to create more informal spaces where artist teachers and their students discussed ideas and developed projects, most outside the traditional frameworks of art-making, projects that aimed to question the very institutional construction of art itself.

A painter, a composer, a drama scholar, two directors, and two radical social scientists sat down at a table in 1969 to plot the future of the California Institute of the Arts. These were CalArts’ first administrators, and the challenge before them—and before the faculty they’d recruited for each of their departments or “schools” of art, film, theater/dance, music, design, and critical studies—was to actualize Walt Disney’s vision of bringing all of the arts together in one institution of higher learning, resulting in “a kind of cross-pollination that [would] bring out the best in its students.”

This interview with Fluxus artist Alison Knowles took place in her Soho apartment in June 2011. Knowles describes being recruited for the original CalArts faculty by Allan Kaprow, the assistant dean of art; what it was like to teach at the institute in the first two years; the kind of student she encountered there; and the radical nature of the pedagogical situation. She also describes several pieces she did at CalArts, including an iteration of her famous House of Dust.

In 1976, Paul McCarthy produced 1500 copies of Criss Cross Double Cross, a tabloid-size newsprint publication that regarded the printed page as a performance space. "It was crazy to do it," said McCarthy. Among the contributors to the one-off issue were Bruce Nauman, Nancy Buchanan, and Martha Rosler.

In 1970, Suzanne Lacy was a second-year graduate student in psychology when she entered Fresno State's burgeoning Feminist Art Program. Her education, and ultimate career, charted new art territories that incorporated training in carpentry skills, consciousness raising, and an emotive feminist approach to conceptual strategies.