L.A. Louver is deeply saddened by the loss of artist George Herms, who passed away last week at the age of 90.
Born in Woodland, CA in 1935, Herms moved to Los Angeles in 1955 when he was twenty years old. He took up residence in Topanga Canyon and soon fell in with the community of Beat poets, artists, and musicians, including Wallace Berman, Bob Alexander and others. These artists would become among Herms’s closest friends and collaborators.
In the late 1950s, Herms began his life-long devotion to assemblage. Poet Michael McClure later described Herms as “someone who is near saintly in his care for the objects that are put together.” The materials selected by Herms were almost always used and worn, embedded with the evidence of age and the patina of personal or shared histories. Through the combination of these remnants, Herms created objects representative of treasured moments, places, people or events, including Alcove of Beginnings (now in the collection of LACMA), The Berman Peace (now collection of Walker Art Center), and The Librarian (now in the collection of the Norton-Simon Museum).
George Herms was one of the first artists to exhibit at L.A. Louver, with the solo exhibition George Herms: Works of Assemblage (1976). Over the years, he presented five solo exhibitions and took part in numerous group shows at the gallery. Additionally, in June 1992, coinciding with the exhibition Poem Makers: Wallace Berman, George Herms, and Jess, L.A. Louver published the facsimile edition of Wallace Berman’s Semina journal. George Herms—who aided Wallace and Shirley Berman with the original publication of the journal—oversaw each part of the facsimile printing process to ensure highest quality and veracity to the original journals.
Of Herms, L.A. Louver Founding Director Peter Goulds remembers “Together with the Newport Harbor Art Museum, we helped launch George Herms’s The Prometheus Archive: A Retrospective in 1979. Accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, the exhibition travelled to The Oakland Museum of Art and to the Seattle Museum of Art, serving to set the stage and to widen George’s intellectual and fun-loving reach. George Herms became known as the ‘poet in letters and objects of our time’ in Southern California.”
Herms’s impish humor and sense of wonder permeated many aspects of his life. L.A. Louver Director Kimberly Davis said that for her, “George will always be remembered as the King of the Jacaranda Festival.” When he was artist-in- residence at the Barnsdall Art Park in the mid 1980s, Herms put on a “Jacaranda Festival” featuring performances and art making activities in celebration of the purple trees.
Throughout his nine decades, George Herms worked across sculpture, paintings, prints, installation, and performance. He had notable retrospectives at the Newport Harbor Art Museum (1979) and The Santa Monica Museum of Art (2005, curated by Walter Hopps). He was awarded three National Endowment for the Arts fellowships (1968, 1977, 1984); the Guggenheim Fellowship in Sculpture (1983-84); and the prestigious Prix de Rome Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome (1982-83). His work is in numerous public and private collections, including the Menil Collection (Houston, TX); the Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY); the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles, CA); and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco, CA).
Herms is survived by his partner, Sue Henger, his children, grandchildren and many friends. He will be missed by all.
