George Herbert Herms (July 5, 1935 – April 24, 2026) was an American artist best known for the assemblages he created out of discarded, often rusty, dirty or broken every-day objects, and juxtaposing those objects so as to infuse them with poetry, humor, and meaning. He was also known for his works on paper, including works with ink, collage, drawing, paint, and poetry. The prolific Herms also created theater pieces, about which he said, "I treat it as a Joseph Cornell box big enough that you can walk around in. It's just a continuation of my sculpture, one year at a time." Prominent curator Walter Hopps, who met Herms in 1956, "placed Herms on a dazzling continuum of assemblage artists that includes Pablo Picasso, Kurt Schwitters, Marcel Duchamp, and Joseph Cornell, as well as California luminaries Wallace Berman and Edward Kienholz", according to the Santa Monica Museum of Art; the Museum identified Herms as a member of the West Coast Beat Generation, and said that he credited Wallace Berman with "teaching him that any object, even a mundane cast-off, could be of great interest if contextualized properly". "That’s my whole thing", Herms said. "I turn shit into gold. I just really want to see something I've never seen before." Herms lived and worked in Irvine, California.
Early life and education George Herms was born in Woodland, California, on July 5, 1935. His grandfather, , was a professor of entomology at the University of California, Berkeley, and his father was an agricultural adviser who worked for Yolo County. During World War II, Herms was sent by his parents to the College of Engineering at Berkeley, where, he said, he "lasted six weeks, till football season was over".
Subsequently, he worked for Remington Rand, on the Universal Automatic Computer (UNIVAC), before leaving for Mexico and other travels. He said in an interview that his parents had offered him $100 per month to return to college, so he took the money and "bought some jazz records and lived on 13 dollars a month", and returned to Los Angeles, living for some time in Topanga Canyon, where he met the artist Wallace Berman on Herms's 20th birthday. Herms helped Berman hang his first show in 1957 at the Ferus Gallery. Reportedly, Herms decided to become an artist when a transient sat down next to him in a Sacramento bus depot and said, "There's the makers, the takers, and the fakers. Which will you be?" Herms did not have formal art school education, yet he was called the "godfather of West Coast assemblage art". During the late 1950s, Herms resided in a number of different cities in California, including Berkeley, Larkspur, and Hermosa Beach before returning for a short period of time to Topanga in 1961. In 1959, Herms became an original member of Bruce Conner's Rat Bastard Protective Association.Its members included Jay DeFeo, Michael McClure, Manuel Neri and Joan Brown. See Solnit, Rebecca, ‘Heretical Constellations: Notes on California, 1946–1961’, in Sussman, ed., Beat Culture and the New America, pp. 69–122, especially p. 71.
Teaching and residencies Herms was a lecturer in Studio Art at University of California, Irvine, and University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA); Sculpture at UCLA and University of California, San Diego; and, Public Art at the Santa Monica College of Design, Art and Architecture. From 1977 to 1979, he was a Visiting Artist at California State University, Fullerton. In 1981, Herms was an artist in residence at the University of Denver in Colorado, and in 1991 an artist in residence at The Robbins Foundation in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In 1994, he was an artist in residence at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles.
Personal life and death Herms had 6 marriages, all of which ended in divorce. He had 4 children, two from his second marriage and two from his fourth. His last relationship was a domestic partnership with Sue Henger for 17 years.
Herms died at his home in Irvine, California, on April 24, 2026, at the age of 90.
Selected exhibitions Solo exhibitions One of Herms's earliest solo shows, "Secret Exhibitions", was mounted in 1957 in Hermosa Beach. Herms was the subject of many other one-person exhibitions, including shows organized by the Semina Gallery in Larkspur, California (1960); the Batman Gallery in San Francisco (1961); two shows at Rolf Nelson Gallery in Los Angeles (1963, 1966); two shows at the Molly Barnes Gallery (1969, 1970); a retrospective of works from 1960 to 1972 at California State University, Los Angeles (1972) and the Memorial Union Art Gallery at UC Davis (1973), for which catalogues were produced; a show at TJB Gallery in Newport Beach, California (1975) called "Pseudonymphia" and featuring the work of several of Herms's imaginary artists such as Paul Mistrie, Eric Hammerscoffer, Iris Firewater, Sigmund Fletcher, and Astropoet Moonstone (Tarzan Feathers was not included in the show); several shows at L.A. Louver in Venice, California (1976, 1982, 1986, 1989); a retrospective exhibition at Newport Harbor Art Museum in Newport Beach, California (1979), which traveled and for which a catalogue was produced; a show at the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art in Santa Ana, California (1980); an exhibition at the University of Denver Art Gallery (1981); a show at California State University at Fullerton (1984); a show at the Oscarsson/Siegeltuch Gallery in New York (1986); a show at the Tyler Gallery at Temple University in Philadelphia (1988); a retrospective organized at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery for which a catalogue was produced (1992); a show at Redbud Gallery in Houston, Texas (2002); a show at Seraphin Gallery, Philadelphia (2002), for which a catalogue was produced; two shows at Ace Gallery in Los Angeles (2003, 2004); a retrospective exhibition curated by Walter Hopps at the Santa Monica Museum of Art (2005); a show at Franklin Parrasch Gallery in New York (2006); a show at Galerie Vallois, Paris (2007); a show at Susan Inglett Gallery, New York (2008); an avant-garde "jazz opera" performed at REDCAT Gallery, CalArts’ experimental art venue (2011); a show at OHWOW Gallery in Los Angeles (2013); "George Herms: On and Off the Wall" at Louis Stern Fine Arts in Los Angeles (2013); and the show "LOVE: George Herms" curated by Sarah Bancroft at testsite in Austin, Texas (2014). Group exhibitions
Herms's work was selected for group exhibitions, beginning with the "Gangbang" exhibition in 1960 at the Batman Gallery in San Francisco.