Wallace Berman

ACTIVE BACKLIST

SHE: IMAGES OF WOMEN BY WALLACE BERMAN & RICHARD PRINCE
Edited by Kristine McKenna.
MICHAEL KOHN GALLERY
ISBN: 9781880086209 | US $48.00
Pub Date: 2/16/2009
Active | Awaiting stock

OUT OF PRINT LISTING

WALLACE BERMAN: PHOTOGRAPHS
Edited and introduction by Kristine McKenna, Lorraine Wild.
ROSEGALLERY, LOS ANGELES
ISBN: 9781933045610 | US $50.00
Pub Date: 5/1/2007
Out of Print | Not available

SEMINA CULTURE: WALLACE BERMAN & HIS CIRCLE
D.A.P./SANTA MONICA MUSEUM OF ART
ISBN: 9781933045108 | US $50.00
Pub Date: 9/15/2005
Out of print | Not available

POETRY PLASTIQUE
Edited by Charles Bernstein and Jay Sanders.
GRANARY BOOKS/MARIANNE BOESKY GALLERY
ISBN: 9781887123518 | US $20.00
Pub Date: 6/2/2001
Out of print | Not available

Wallace Berman

She: Images of Women by Wallace Berman & Richard Prince

Edited by Kristine McKenna.
Published by Michael Kohn Gallery

The use of heterosexual pornography or soft erotica in collage and assemblage is often all too uncritical, but for a few of the California artists who came of age in the early 1950s, its applications were much more nuanced. For example, Wallace Berman's 1957 "Cross" assemblage features a close-up photograph of heterosexual penetration that affirms sex as a "factum fidei" ("true fact," as Berman's inscription went)--its explicitness serving simply as realism. This approach to "girlie magazine" imagery and its polar opposite--the impulse to decommodify sexuality--can both be found in the photographs, paintings and books of Richard Prince, an artist whose fondness for the era of Berman is well known. She traces these overlaps and sympathies with reproductions of previously unseen works by Berman and new images from Prince's Girlfriends and de Kooning series. Also including an interview with Prince, She is edited by Kristine McKenna, whose ongoing work on Wallace Berman and his contemporaries continues to yield exciting discoveries.

Wallace Berman: Photographs

Edited and introduction by Kristine McKenna, Lorraine Wild.
Published by RoseGallery, Los Angeles

The quintessential visual artist of the Beat generation, Wallace Berman's influence has continued to radiate throughout the American art scene and in our popular culture since the 1950s. As an artist, Berman worked in relative obscurity up until his premature death, at the age of 50, in 1976. Since then, however, interest in his work, and recognition of its importance, have steadily increased. The subject of the recent--and highly lauded--traveling exhibition and accompanying catalogue, Semina Culture: Wallace Berman & His Circle, he was the central and binding figure in a diverse community of artists, poets, actors and musicians, and was revered for his wisdom as well as his achievements as an artist, publisher and filmmaker. However, until the 1999 discovery of an archive of his photographic negatives, very few people have known that Berman was also an extremely accomplished photographer. He documented the West Coast Beat culture of the 1950s, the first stirrings of the hippie culture that took root in the canyons of Southern California in the 60s and the diverse cast of characters who passed through his famously creative world with amazing intimacy and candor. Berman's photographs are gathered here for the first time ever.

Semina Culture: Wallace Berman & His Circle

Edited by Michael Duncan and Kristine McKenna. Essays by Michael Duncan and Kristine McKenna and Stephen Fredman.
Published by D.A.P./Santa Monica Museum of Art

The quintessential visual artist of the Beat era, Wallace Berman (1926-1976) remains one of the best kept secrets of the late twentieth century. A crucial figure in California's postwar underground, Berman was a catalyst who traveled through many different worlds, transferring ideas and dreams from one circle to the next. His larger community is the subject of Semina Culture: Wallace Berman & His Circle, a catalogue to the exhibition organized by the Santa Monica Muesum of Art including previously unexhibited works by 52 artists. Anchoring this publication is Semina, a loose-leaf art and poetry journal that Berman published in nine issues between 1955 and 1964. Although privately made and distributed to a mere handful of friends and sympathizers, Semina is a brilliant compendium of the most interesting artists and poets of its time. Showcasing the individuals who came to define a still potent strand of post-war beat counterculture, Semina Culture subtly outlines the energies, values, and foibles of this fascinating circle. Also reprduced here are works by various artists and writers who appear in Berman's own photographs--approximately 100 of which were recently developed from vintage negatives, and will be seen here for the first time.

Poetry Plastique

Edited by Charles Bernstein and Jay Sanders.
Published by Granary Books/Marianne Boesky Gallery

Accompanying a unique exhibition at the respected Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York, this book is a remarkable combination of the work of poets and artists, that explores in new ways the relationship between the visual and the verbal. In his preface, Charles Bernstein writes: "Not words and pictures but poems as visual objects. Not poems about pictures but pictures that are poems. Not works closed in a book but hanging on a wall or suspended from the ceiling or rising from the floor or sounding from inside a figure or embedded with paint on a canvas or written in the sky or flickering on a screen." Co-curator Jay Sanders explains in his introduction: "We had a gallery and we wanted to flood it with poetry. Not with "poetic" artwork, but with actual poetry, made by poets. But, we have gallery walls, not pages in a book. So we organized a show of art overrun with poetry and a show of poetry riddled with art."