Simone Forti, Pioneering Artist of Movement and Chance, Dies at 91

Simone Forti, the Italian-American choreographer, performer and artist who transformed the boundary between dance, performance art and the visual arts, died on the morning of Wednesday, July 29, 2026, at her home in Los Angeles. The news was given by Jason Underhill, her longtime assistant and a trustee of the Simone Forti Art Trust. No cause has been stated, though she had spoken openly for years about living with Parkinson's disease. Writing a tribute for Hyperallergic, Matt Stromberg observes that her career mixed boundless curiosity with formal rigour across a range running from movement and painting to poetry, video and even holography, and spanning three cities: New York, Los Angeles and Rome. Forti was born into a Jewish family in Florence on March 25, 1935, and was three years old when, in 1938, as the Mussolini government stripped Italian Jews of their citizenship, her family fled the country and eventually settled in Los Angeles. She entered Reed College in Oregon but dropped out and moved to San Francisco with the minimalist artist Robert Morris, whom she had married in 1955. There she apprenticed with Anna Halprin and contributed to Halprin's early works. In 1959 the pair moved to New York, where Forti fell in with the emerging Fluxus circle, teaching nursery school by day and studying improvisation and composition at night at the Merce Cunningham Studio under Robert Ellis Dunn. Her most important early works were the Dance Constructions, begun in 1960 and first presented at the Reuben Gallery during a happening involving Claes Oldenburg and Jim Dine, and then at Yoko Ono's Chambers Street loft. In these pieces the performers were given only simple instructions and objects, sloped boards, rope, wheeled boxes, a seesaw, and the course of the performance was decided by body weight, cooperation and chance. Rather than compose a fixed sequence of movements, Forti built the conditions in which movement could arise on the spot. In See Saw (1960), two performers carried out ordinary actions while riding a seesaw. The best known is Huddle (1961), in which a group stands pressed together and each person in turn climbs over the others' bodies and rejoins the mass, a living sculpture moving through the gallery. These experiments shaped artists such as Yvonne Rainer and Steve Paxton and the formation of the Judson Dance Theater, the movement that redefined contemporary dance through the 1960s. By dissolving the border between artistic movement and ordinary behaviour, Forti showed that walking, climbing, crawling or keeping one's balance could themselves be the substance of a work of art. In later years she extended her range into painting, poetry, video, sound and holography. Watching animals move at the zoo inspired a series of her performances; she did not imitate the repetitive movements of captive animals but saw in them a kind of effort to come to terms with loneliness and confinement. Forti went on performing and teaching almost to the end of her life, and taught generations of artists, including at UCLA. The Getty Research Institute acquired her archive in 2020, and its chief curator Glenn Phillips has said that the longer you look, the more you find her standing in the middle of nearly every avant-garde that surfaced in New York and California across at least five decades. In 2015 the Museum of Modern Art in New York, after long deliberation over how a performance could enter a collection at all, acquired the Dance Constructions, a watershed in the museum collecting of dance. 2023 was her year of recognition: the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement from the Venice Biennale's dance section, and a survey of her work at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. She had earlier received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005 and the Anonymous Was a Woman award in 2015. Of visitors' responses to that survey she said that this was what it was all about: the work gets to work, and to move people. Simone Forti's legacy lives in works that treat movement not as a display of skill but as a way of thinking with the body, an art built out of gravity, weight, chance and the relation between a person and their surroundings. Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBaRsjHwn0E

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