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3/3/2005

George Herms

Santa Monica Museum of Art SMMoA, Santa Monica

Hot set

Guest Curator: Walter Hopps
"A bricoleur is an ingenious fix-it man who can work wonders with the simplest tools and almost no materials."
Walter Hopps, from the interview "George Herms: The Bricoleur of Broken Dreams...One More Once"

From March 5 to May 14, 2005, Santa Monica Museum of Art presents George Herms: Hot Set, a comprehensive survey featuring forty-five works of sculpture, collage, and assemblage from 1959 to the present by Beat generation artist and poet George Herms. Hot Set is organized by Walter Hopps, and is the first museum exhibition curated in Southern California by this art world icon in many years. Long a proponent of Herms's work, Hopps first met the artist in 1956 just one year before Hopps opened the legendary Ferus Gallery on La Cienega with artist Edward Kienholz. Hopps compares Herms's work in assemblage to that of Pablo Picasso, Kurt Schwitters, Joseph Cornell, Wallace Berman, and Edward Kienholz. Hot Set offers a rigorous reappraisal of the range and breadth of Herms's oeuvre through the enlightened perspective of a curatorial giant of contemporary art.

From his first "secret" show in deserted area in Hermosa Beach, California, to his current practice, George Herms uses found objects to create lyrical, elegiac works, often in tribute to his heroes and friends. Herms was born in Woodland, California in 1935. In 1955, he met artist Wallace Berman and poet Robert Alexander, who introduced him to the emerging West Coast Beat scene. Throughout his career, Herms has worked across disciplines, using poetry, film, performance, and assemblage as his mediums. In 1961, he was included in The Art of Assemblage at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Today, his sculpture is requisite in all major art museum holdings as representative of the California assemblage movement. In the early sixties, Herms established The LOVE Press and began publishing woodcuts and books of poetry, including writings by Michael McClure, Diane di Prima, and Jack Hirschman. Herms has been honored with three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in Sculpture, the Prix de Rome Fellowship in Sculpture from the American Academy in Rome, and the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Award. He is presently a visiting scholar for 2004 - 2005 at the Getty Research Institute. Herms lives and works in Los Angeles.

Walter Hopps began his curatorial career in 1954, when he opened the Syndell Studio Gallery while still a student at UCLA. Three years later, he cofounded the Ferus Gallery on La Cienega Boulevard with artist Edward Kienholz. At Ferus, Hopps showed the work of such seminal artists as Wallace Berman, Jay DeFeo, Robert Irwin, and Edward Kienholz. As director of the Pasadena Art Museum from 1962 to 1967, Hopps organized such groundbreaking exhibitions as Collage - Artists in California (Directions in Collage), companion to the Kurt Schwitters retrospective and an exhibition that included an artist just at the start of his career - George Herms, and Marcel Duchamp: In Resonance, the artist's first museum survey. Hopps was the director of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; curator of twentieth century art, National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institutions; and he was the founder of the Joseph Cornell Study Center at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC. Hopps is the founding director of The Menil Collection in Houston; a curator of twentieth century art for the Collection; and adjunct senior curator of twentieth century art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

George Herms: Hot Set is the first museum exhibition curated in Southern California by this art world icon and impresario in many years.

The exhibition is accompanied by a SMMoA-produced catalog, containing "George Herms: The Bricoleur of Broken Dreams...One Once More," an extraordinary conversation with Herms and Hopps, conducted and edited by writer Anne Doran.

Project Room I:
BLUE McRIGHT: MORANDI'S LAWN
The exhibition continues her explorations of the various states of transformation between the natural and the man-made. Morandi's Lawn utilizes non-traditional sculptural materials, as well as digital photography in an installation consisting of over four hundred objects.

Project Room II:
KOTA EZAWA: ON PHOTOGRAPHY
Ezawa's work explores the appropriation and mediation of current events and images. He translates found film, video, and photographic footage into simplified drawings and animations that reduce complex imagery to its most essential, two-dimensional elements. In The Simpson Verdict (2002), for example, Ezawa animated the news footage of the end of the O.J. criminal trial, reducing an emotionally-charged moment to a series of precise and powerful gestures.


Events:
George Herms: The Bricoleur Of Broken Dreams...One More Once
Tuesday, March 8, 6:30 pm
A conversation between George Herms and legendary curator Walter Hopps, moderated by writer Anne Doran
Free admission

Gluing Together a World: West Coast Assemblage Art - A Discussion by Michael Duncan and Happy Birthday Milieu - A Theater Piece by George Herms
Friday, March 18, 7 pm
Norton Simon Museum
411 West Colorado Boulevard, Pasadena, CA 91105
http://www.nortonsimon.org
Art historical lecture by independent writer and curator Michael Duncan with musical rebuttal by George Herms. Organized by the Norton Simon Museum in conjunction with Lost but Found: Assemblage, Collage & Sculpture, 1920 - 2002.
Free with Norton Simon Museum admission

Image: George Herms, Fresh, Cool, 1963. Assemblage 21 x 10 x 8 inches. Courtesy the artist

Santa Monica Museum of Art is located at Bergamot Station, G1, 2525 Michigan Avenue, Santa Monica. SMMoA is open Tuesday through Saturday 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., closed Sunday, Monday, and all legal holidays.
Admission to the museum is a suggested donation of $5 for adults, $3 for students and seniors

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