George Herms, Titan of West Coast Assemblage, Dies at 90
Artist George Herms, a foundational figure in the West Coast Assemblage movement, died on Friday, April 24, at age 90. Born July 5, 1935 in Woodland, California, Herms left engineering studies at UC Berkeley in 1954 for Los Angeles, where he joined the Beat scene in Topanga Canyon and worked with Wallace Berman on the journal Semina while also printing poems through his Love Press. He began making assemblages from found materials and staged a self-curated 1957 “Secret Exhibition” in a Hermosa Beach vacant lot; in 1961 he was included in MoMA’s landmark exhibition The Art of Assemblage, alongside figures associated with California assemblage such as Ed and Nancy Kienholz, Bettye Saar, Noah Purifoy, and Ed Bereal. Later exhibitions cited include George Herms: Xenophilia (Love of the Unknown) at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2011), Emergio at Morán Morán (2013), George Herms: On and Off the Wall at Louis Stern Gallery (2013), and Grand Embrace at Susan Inglett Gallery (2019).
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This story was covered in Sanctions, Scandals, and Venice’s Market Fever