Wallace Berman: Art Basel 2019

Born in Staten Island, Wallace Berman moved to Los Angeles as a child. He enrolled at the Jepson Art Institute and at Chouinard Art Institute, but did not finish studies at either; instead he became entrenched in the city’s jazz and Beat scenes. Wallace Berman held his first solo show at the Ferus Gallery in 1957, but the exhibition was closed prematurely by the L.A. Police Department’s vice squad. According to Dennis Hopper, «he affected and influenced everybody seriously involved in the arts in Los Angeles in the 1950’s. If there was a guru, he was it – the high priest, the holyman, the rabbi.» Berman and his family relocated to the Bay Area and between 1953 and 1965, his small house on Crater Lane was the center of a community of artists. He established the makeshift Semina Gallery in Larkspur and continued his loose-leaf magazine Semina, before returning to L.A. in 1961. In 1964, Berman began to make Verifax collages, embarking on a path that he would follow for over a decade, until his death in Topanga Canyon in 1976.