George Herms

George Herms is a native Californian artist who played a significant role as an early innovator of assemblage art on the West Coast. Over the course of his six-decade career, he has worked on small and large scales, producing sculptures, works on paper, and installations that often include text amidst other disparate objects. Utilizing found elements, Herms entirely re-contextualizes these components—fully divorced from their original functions, they are ultimately rendered mysterious and purely formal. The textual elements, meanwhile, are heavily influenced by Herms’s Beat contemporaries, including Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, William S. Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg, among others. Furthermore, Herms’s masterful transformation of discarded items into poetic, autonomous artworks is on par with another contemporary on the East Coast: Robert Rauschenberg.

Herms’s work is held in numerous major, public collections such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Menil Collection in Houston, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He has exhibited his work extensively, including at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (where he was included in the groundbreaking show “The Art of Assemblage," in 1961), as well as at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, the Santa Monica Museum of Art, the California Museum of Fine Art in Torrance, and the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento.