Berman, Wallace

Wallace Berman was born in 1926 in Staten Island, New York, but moved to Los Angeles's Jewish district with his family in the 1930s. After his expulsion from high school--for gambling--in the 1940s, Berman immersed himself in the growing West Coast jazz scene. By the early 1950s, he was a full-time artist (many historians now consider him to be the father of California assemblage) and a leading figure in the Los Angeles and San Francisco Beat communities, between which he established his influential mail art periodical "SEMINA". Berman settled in Topanga Canyon, Los Angeles in 1966, and died t...