Personal Life and Education
Wallace Berman was born in Staten Island, New York in 1926. In the 1930s his family moved to Boyle Heights, Los Angeles.. Berman was discharged from high school for gambling in the early 1940s and became involved in the West Coast jazz scene. Berman wrote a song with Jimmy Witherspoon. He attended classes at Jepson Art Institute and Chouinard Art Institute in the 1940s. For a few years from 1949 he worked in a factory finished furniture. It was at the factory where he began creating sculptures from wood scraps. This led to him becoming a full-time artist by the early 1950s, and an involvement in the Beat Movement. He moved from Los Angeles to San Francisco in late 1957 where he mostly focused on his magazine Semina, which consisted of poetry, photographs, texts, drawings and images assembled by Berman. In 1961 he came back to L.A., then moved to Topanga Canyon in 1965. He started creating his series of Verifax Collages in 1963 or 1964. Director Dennis Hopper, a collector of Berman's work, gave Berman a small role in his 1968 film Easy Rider. He produced work until his sudden death in a car accident caused by a drunk driver, in 1976.Interestingly, Berman had said to his mother as a child he would die on his 50th birthday, and indeed he did die February 18th 1976...his fiftieth birthday. ref. Lost and Found California, Four decades of assemblage art, Corcoran, Wayne, Pence, 1988 pg.119.
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