This collection offers researchers extensive materials from artist, dancer, performer, and writer Simone Forti, a seminal figure in the development of minimalism and experimental dance since the 1960s. Her archive provides insight into her creative process and development as well as her connections to major artistic figures in performance, minimalism, and process-based art from San Francisco to New York City.

The unpublished materials include 125 diaries, notebooks, and sketchbooks; photographic and audiovisual materials; drawings; scores; correspondence; project files; ephemera; and one of Forti's groundbreaking works in holography. Serving as a chronicle of Forti's life and ideas since the late 1960s, the collection foregrounds her often underrecognized strength as a writer, offers a trove of biographical information, and traces the intellectual development of her major projects and series.

Forti is best known for her Dance Constructions–including works such as Slant Board, See-Saw, and Huddle–which were first performed in 1960 at the Reuben Gallery in Soho and again a year later in Yoko Ono's loft. Making use of props, sound, and geometric structures, these performances were early forerunners of postmodern dance and minimalism.

This archive complements others held by the Getty Research Institute including those of Allan Kaprow, The Kitchen, Robert McElroy, Yvonne Rainer, Harry Shunk and Shunk-Kender, Barbara T. Smith, Harald Szeemann, and David Tudor, as well as the Fluxus collections of Jean Brown.