Alison Knowles, one of the most influential voices of the 1960s Fluxus movement and the mind behind landmark participatory works such as Make a Salad (1962), died on October 29 in New York at the age of 92. Her gallery, James Fuentes, confirmed her passing but did not disclose the cause.

A pioneer of experimental art and performance, Knowles built an extraordinary career by elevating the ordinary. Using humble materials like beans, shells, nets, and tunafish, she created sculptures, scores, and performances that invited anyone to participate. Her work emphasized that art could emerge from everyday actions and that creativity was accessible to all.

Among her defining works was Make a Salad, perhaps the most celebrated event score of the Fluxus canon. The piece consists solely of a title—an open invitation to assemble a salad in any way the performer chooses. From its debut in 1962 at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts to large-scale renditions at Art Basel and Tate Modern, the work underscored Knowles’s belief in openness, spontaneity, and shared experience. Yet she often reminded audiences that such works could unfold just as meaningfully at home as in a museum.

Behind the simplicity, there was a deeper cultural critique. Reflecting on Make a Salad in 2016, Knowles noted that food and domestic labor were domains she understood intimately as a young woman, wife, and soon-to-be mother. Performing such tasks onstage, she suggested, challenged ideas about gender roles and what counted as art.

Knowles also authored the iconic Fluxus piece The Identical Lunch, instructing participants to repeatedly consume a tunafish sandwich on wheat toast with lettuce and butter—her own preferred midday ritual. Colleagues, including Shigeko Kubota and Ay-O, were invited to join her, turning routine nourishment into shared inquiry and performance. “It was about having an excuse to talk to people,” she once said. “To notice everything that happened.”

Born in Scarsdale, New York, in 1933, Knowles studied painting at Middlebury College and later at the Pratt Institute under Josef Albers and Adolph Gottlieb. Immersed in New York’s avant-garde scene of the 1950s and ’60s, she found herself among peers such as John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Allan Kaprow, participating in Happenings and attending mushroom-foraging excursions with Cage.

Knowles performed at the first Fluxus concert in Wiesbaden in 1962 and contributed seminal poetic and musical works throughout her career. She co-created Notations with Cage and produced one of the earliest computer-generated poems, House of Dust (1967), written with composer James Tenney using FORTRAN. Her artistic practice extended into sculpture as well, with notable works such as The Boat Book paying tribute to her family and coastal memories.

Despite her importance, Knowles often stood outside institutional art circuits. She did not appear in Documenta or the Whitney Biennial, and her first full retrospective, organized by the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, came only in 2022 before traveling to Wiesbaden in 2024.

Yet her influence remains expansive, her work living through countless participatory moments rather than static recognition. “I want my work to expand the terms of engagement,” she said in 2022. “I don’t want people looking passively—I want them touching, eating, listening, making, taking part.”

Alison Knowles leaves behind an enduring legacy of art rooted not in spectacle but in presence, curiosity, and shared human gestures. Her work continues to remind the world that meaning can be made from the simplest acts—and that anyone, truly, can be an artist.