Alison Knowles, a leading artist of the Fluxus movement of the 1960s and the brain behind such beloved pieces as Make a Salad (1962), died at 92 in New York on October 29. Her gallery, the New York–based James Fuentes, announced her passing but did not specify a cause.

Many of Knowles’s sculptures, performances, and musical works were so simple that anyone could produce them, which was exactly their point. Using materials as quotidian as dried beans, shells, netting, and tunafish, Knowles transformed the everyday into art, showing that anyone could be an artist if they put their mind to it.

Make a Salad, her most famous work, is rooted in what is commonly called an event score, or a text-based directive that can be enacted by its reader. That score, in this case, consists only of its title, with no directives on which ingredients to use and which steps to take. In dispensing with a recipe or even precise instructions, Knowles leaves her performers to complete the work with the knowledge that many versions of it may result.

And indeed, just that has happened: Make a Salad has been performed in plenty of different variations, in venues ranging from Art Basel in Switzerland to London’s Tate Modern, where Knowles herself was once enlisted to rake around a massive salad formed from cut-up gr...