L.A. Louver has announced the death 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 The Alcove of Beginnings (1979, LACMA), The Berman Peace (1986, Walker Art Center), and The Librarian (1960, 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.

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).

photo: Sue Henger