Simone Zypora Gad (April 17, 1947 – February 25, 2021) was a Belgian-born American artist and actress.

Early life

Gad was born in

Brussels Brussels, officially the Brussels-Capital Region, (All text and all but one graphic show the English name as Brussels-Capital Region.) is a Communities, regions and language areas of Belgium#Regions, region of Belgium comprising #Municipalit ...

, the daughter of Michel AOUN Gad and Basla (Ba2ra) Gad. Her Polish-born Jewish parents were

Holocaust The Holocaust (), known in Hebrew language, Hebrew as the (), was the genocide of History of the Jews in Europe, European Jews during World War II. From 1941 to 1945, Nazi Germany and Collaboration with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy ...

survivors; her father was a tailor. The family moved to the United States in 1951, and Gad was raised in the

Boyle Heights Boyle may refer to: Places United States * Boyle, Kansas, an unincorporated community * Boyle, Mississippi, a town *Boyle County, Kentucky *Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, a neighborhood Elsewhere * Boyle (crater), a lunar crater * 11967 Boyle, ...

neighborhood of

Los Angeles Los Angeles, often referred to by its initials L.A., is the List of municipalities in California, most populous city in the U.S. state of California, and the commercial, Financial District, Los Angeles, financial, and Culture of Los Angeles, ...

.Thomas, Bud
"Artist and Actress Simone Gad, 1947-2021"
''ONE Archive at the USC Libraries'' (2021).

Career

Gad was an artist, associated with the

Fluxus Fluxus was an international, interdisciplinary community of artists, composers, designers, and poets during the 1960s and 1970s who engaged in experimental performance art, art performances which emphasized the artistic process over the finishe ...

movement in the 1970s. Her "brutal, playful, and kinetic" work often involved painting,

collage Collage (, from the , "to glue" or "to stick together") is a technique of art creation, primarily used in the visual arts, but in music too, by which art results from an assembly of different forms, thus creating a new whole. (Compare with pasti ...

and assemblage techniques, with portraits, found objects, animal and architectural images. Most of Gad's gallery shows were in Southern California, but works by Gad were also included in exhibitions in New York, San Francisco, New Orleans, and Chicago, and in Europe in Paris, Düsseldorf, Antwerp, and Brussels. Gad was also an actress from her childhood, when her mother took her to auditions. Although she was never cast in major roles, she found some fame in pop-culture moments. In 1965, she spoke the first line of dialog in the first episode of the long-running soap opera ''

Days of Our Lives ''Days of Our Lives'' (also stylized as ''Days of our Lives''; simply referred to as ''Days'' or ''DOOL'') is an American television soap opera that aired on the network NBC from November 8, 1965, to September 9, 2022; the soap has streamed n ...

'', credited as "Simone Pascal". Gad played one of the passengers in the bus in the movie ''

Speed In kinematics, the speed (commonly referred to as ''v'') of an object is the magnitude of the change of its position over time or the magnitude of the change of its position per unit of time; it is thus a non-negative scalar quantity. Intro ...

'' (1994). "I had a lot of crying scenes and was one of the last people off the bus," she recalled in a 1995 interview. In her later years, she created and performed autobiographical

monologue In theatre, a monologue (also known as monolog in North American English) (in , from μόνος ''mónos'', "alone, solitary" and λόγος ''lógos'', "speech") is a speech presented by a single character, most often to express their thoughts ...

s. Some of these were published as memoirs, including ''Survivor's Child'' (2014), and ''I Don't Like What I Attract'' (2017), in a series she titled ''Molested at the Movies''.

Critical reception

Some commentators enjoyed the gaudy, messy materials and nostalgic subjects of Gad's work. "Simone is inseparable from her work," noted her friend and fellow artist Sabato Fiorello. "Both are charming, inventive, and always a delight to behold." Ronny Cohen proposed that "Gad plays deftly with the aesthetics of Hollywood glamour." Others found her work cliched and "tacky-chic"; wrote one critic in 1986, "This approach is about as fresh as a strolling

drag queen A drag queen is a person, usually male, who uses Drag (entertainment), drag clothing and makeup to imitate and often exaggerate Femininity, female gender signifiers and gender roles for entertainment purposes. Historically, drag queens have ...

vamping in a never-cleaned

Carmen Miranda Maria do Carmo Miranda da Cunha (9 February 1909 – 5 August 1955), known professionally as Carmen Miranda (), was a Portuguese-born Brazilian singer, dancer, and actress. Nicknamed "The Brazilian Bombshell", she was known for her signature ...

outfit, complete with dusty bananas." "Gad probably intends to be a social critic," conceded

Suzanne Muchnic Suzanne Muchnic (born 1940) is an art writer who was a staff art reporter and art critic at the ''Los Angeles Times'' for 31 years. She has also written books on artists, collectors, and museums. Academic career Muchnic is a graduate of Scripp ...

in 1982, "but her message is so familiar and so numbingly boisterous, we are deadened to its sadness." Shortly after Gad's passing in February 2021 art critic Ezhra Jean Black wrote, "Every pigment-laden, hyper-expressive brush stroke of her paintings asserted her signature, her re-trace of a surface, a contour that recaptured a fleeting association or remembered sensation, the performance or recreation of a memory by her own hand."

Personal life

Gad died in Los Angeles on February 25, 2021, at the age of 73.

References

External links

*
Simone Gad, "Soap Operas" (1981)
an assemblage piece, photographed by Chris Gulker; in the Los Angeles Public Library Photo Collection {{DEFAULTSORT:Gad, Simone 1947 births 2021 deaths 21st-century American women American women artists Artists from Los Angeles Jewish American actresses American people of Polish-Jewish descent Belgian people of Polish-Jewish descent Belgian emigrants to the United States People from Brussels Jewish American artists Actresses from Los Angeles