Bean Rolls by Alison Knowles answers questions about beans you didn’t even know you had.

Bean Rolls consists of a metal tin filled with sixteen scrolls and actual dried beans. The label of the tin box was designed by Fluxus artist George Maciunas. The scrolls are collages of images and texts about beans that the artist got from botanical cookbooks, textbooks, songs about beans, recipes, stories, and cartoons. She even used words from other languages that sound like “bean” such as the German word “bin," which means “am." Alison Knowles researched this information at the New York Public Library. If you ever thought that you are obsessed with something as trivial as beans, take comfort in knowing that you didn’t go to a public library to make a box containing that thing with every piece of information you could find about it.

Knowles added the dried beans so the box would make a sound when you shake it, but the work is more about being an experimental book about beans - a book in a can, so to speak. The texts on the scrolls were also used for a performance where several people read them out loud at the Café Gogo in New York. During the event, one of the performers cut out pieces of the scrolls that had already been read.

Even though the work is reminiscent of mass-produced cans you can buy at the supermarket, it has a highly personal aspect related to Knowles' life - her mother helped her to make the tin cans. Knowles did plan, however, to mass-produce the item, but the idea was never realized. Today, there are only a few versions of Bean Rolls left, which can only be viewed during certain exhibitions. If you are ever at the MoMA and you’re lucky, you might get a chance to see inside the mysterious box.