George Herms

George Herms (born 1935) is an American artist best known for making assemblages out of discarded, often rusty, dirty or broken every-day objects, and juxtaposing those objects so as to infuse them with poetry, humor and meaning. He is also known for his works on paper, including works with ink, collage, drawing, paint and poetry. The prolific Herms has also created theater pieces, about which he has said, "I treat it as a Joseph Cornell box big enough that you can walk around in. It's just a continuation of my sculpture, one year at a time." Legendary curator Walter Hopps, who met Herms in 1956, "placed Herms on a dazzling continuum of assemblage artists that includes Pablo Picasso, Kurt Schwitters, Marcel Duchamp, and Joseph Cornell, as well as California luminaries Wallace Berman and Edward Kienholz." Often called a member of the West Coast Beat movement, Herms said that Wallace Berman taught him that "any object, even a mundane cast-off, could be of great interest if contextualized properly." "That’s my whole thing," Herms says. "I turn shit into gold. I just really want to see something I've never seen before." George Herms lives and works in Los Angeles.

George Herms was born in 1935, 18 miles north of Sacramento, in Woodland, California. His grandfather was an entomologist and one-time mayor of Berkeley, California, and his father was an agronomist. During World War II, Herms was sent by his parents to the College of Engineering at Berkeley, which he left after approximately six weeks when "the football season was over."

Subsequently he worked for Remington Rand, on the Universal Automatic Computer (UNIVAC), before leaving for Mexico and other travel. His parents offered him $100 per month to return to college, so he took the money and "bought some jazz records and lived on $13 per month," and returned to Los Angeles, living for some time in Topanga Canyon, where he met the artists Wallace Berman and Robert Alexander on the occasion of his 20th birthday. Herms helped Wallace Berman hang his first show in 1957 at Ferus Gallery. Reportedly, Herms decided to become an artist when a transient sat down next to him in a Sacramento bus depot and said, "There's the makers, the takers, and the fakers. Which will you be?" Herms did not have a formal art school education, yet he has been called the "godfather of West Coast assemblage art." During the late 1950s, Herms resided in a number of different cities in California, including Berkeley, Larkspur and Hermosa Beach before returning for a short period of time to Topanga in 1961. In 1959, Herms became an original member of Bruce Conner's Rat Bastard Protective Association

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