Artbook @ MoMA PS1 presents Tosh Berman and Andrew Lampert on Growing Up in Wallace Berman’s World

Saturday, February 23 from 3–5 PM, MoMA PS1 Book Space presents a conversation between Tosh Berman and Andrew Lampert in celebration of TOSH: Growing Up in Wallace Berman’s World, published by City Lights. Book signing to follow!
Through the prism of Tosh Berman, only child, born 1954 to Wallace and Shirley, who personified the wild heart of 20th century West Coast art, we are offered a truly intimate invitation into a magic world of outliers, visionaries and shooting stars. TOSH recounts a life 'lived like a good book on a bookshelf,' a memoir resonant with discovery, passion, music, art, sex, celebrity, ego, desire and dignity. All told with a son's love for his father, a continuing light into the creative life. —Thurston Moore, musician & writer

Tosh Berman's sweet and affecting memoir provides an intimate glimpse of his father, Wallace, and the exciting, seat-of-the-pants LA art scene of the 1960s, and it also speaks to the hearts of current and former lonely teenagers everywhere. —Luc Sante, writer

This book is perfection. I wish it went on forever. Maybe, somehow, it does. TOSH is almost like a giant map of a small city… Each sentence is a street. Each chapter is an era. Each memory revealing a secret passage from one place to the next… TO READ IT is to WALK IT with Tosh Berman. —Jason Schwartzman, actor
TOSH is a memoir of growing up as the son of an enigmatic, much-admired, hermetic and ruthlessly bohemian artist during the waning years of the Beat Generation and the heyday of hippie counterculture. A critical figure in the history of postwar American culture, Tosh Berman's father, Wallace Berman, was known as the "father of assemblage art," and was the creator of the legendary mail-art publication Semina. Wallace Berman and his wife, famed beauty and artist's muse Shirley Berman, raised Tosh between Los Angeles and San Francisco, and their home life was a heady atmosphere of art, music and literature, with local and international luminaries regularly passing through.

Tosh's unconventional childhood and peculiar journey to adulthood features an array of famous characters, from George Herms and Marcel Duchamp, to Michael McClure and William S. Burroughs, to Dennis Hopper and Dean Stockwell, to the Rolling Stones, Neil Young and Toni Basil.

TOSH takes an unflinching look at the triumphs and tragedies of his unusual upbringing by an artistic genius with all-too-human frailties, against a backdrop that includes The T.A.M.I. Show, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Easy Rider and more. With a preface by actress/writer Amber Tamblyn (daughter of Wallace's friend, actor Russ Tamblyn), TOSH is a self-portrait taken at the crossroads of popular culture and the avant-garde. The index of names included represents a who's who of mid-century American—and international—culture.

This event is free and open to the public.

E-mail booksmomaps1@artbook.com to pre-order a signed copy of TOSH: Growing Up in Wallace Berman’s World.

Book Space
Artbook @ MoMA PS1 Bookstore
22-25 Jackson Avenue
Long Island City, NY 1110
(718) 433-1088