Biographies of the Exhibited Artists

William Saroyan was an Armenian-American fiction writer and playwright, born in 1908 (d. 1981) who, as a young man, dropped out of high school and moved to San Francisco to work various jobs while he tried to write fiction.  At the age of 20, after publishing his first story in a local magazine, he decided to make his career as a writer.  By 1940, Saroyan had written 500 stories, as well as essays, poems and plays.  His work – which was marked by his dynamic self-assured style - won him an Academy Award, the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Times Drama Circle Award. His short stories include: The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, My Name is Aram, and Inhale & Exhale. Saroyan wrote plays for Broadway and screenplays for Hollywood, including My Heart’s in the Highlands, The Time of Your Life, The Beautiful People, and The Human Comedy. 

Lawrence Ferlinghetti was born in 1919. He is an American author of poetry, translations, fiction, theatre, art criticism, and film narration, as well as a painter and the co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers. In 1947 he earned a master’s degree in English literature from Columbia University and went on to live in Paris between 1947 and 1951, where he earned a Doctorat de l’Université de Paris, with a “mention très honorable.” Ferlinghetti began painting in Paris in 1948 and subsequently moved to San Francisco in the 1950s, where he continued to write and paint. In 1953, Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin founded City Lights Bookstore, the first all-paperbound bookshop in the country. Two years later, after the departure of Martin, he launched the publishing wing of City Lights with his own first book of poems, Pictures of the Gone World, the first number in the Pocket Poets Series.  He is best known for “A Coney Island of the Mind” (1958), a collection of poems that has been translated into nine languages. 

Kenneth Rexroth, 1905-1982, was an American poet, translator, and critical essayist. While he did not consider himself a Beat poet, he was one of the major influences on the Beat generation, as he was among the first poets in the United States to explore traditional Japanese poetic forms.  After the deaths of his mother in 1916 and his father in 1918, he enrolled in the Art Institute of Chicago.  While in Chicago, he began to identify with the concerns of an agitated proletarian class.  He would recite poetry from a soapbox on street corners downtown.  At 19, Rexroth embarked on a series of journeys across the US, and on to Mexico, South America and Paris, where he met many notable avant-garde figures including Tristan Tzara and the Surrealists. After meeting his first wife, he moved to San Francisco, staying in California for the remainder of his life. Rexroth developed poetry, essays and journalism which reflected his interests in jazz, politics, culture, and ecology.

Jack Hirschman, born in New York City, in 1933, is an American poet and social activist who has written more than 50 volumes of poetry and essays.  He received a Bachelor of Arts from City College of New York in 1955, and an A.M. and Ph. D. from Indiana University in 1957 and 1961, respectively.  He taught at Dartmouth College and UCLA but was fired from UCLA after encouraging his students to resist the draft. In 1973, Hirschman moved to San Francisco, where he became an active street poet and a peripatetic activist.  He is also a painter, collagist and translator, as well as an assistant editor at the left-wing literary journal Left Curve and a correspondent for The People’s Tribune. In 2006, Hirschman was appointed Poet Laureate of San Francisco. He was instrumentyal in developing San Francisco’s International Poetry Festival.  Hirschman is active with the Revolutionary Poets Brigade and curates the Poets 11 Anthology, which collects poetry from each of the City’s eleven districts.

Jess (Collins), born in 1923 (d. 2004), was an American visual artist originally from Long Beach, California.  Drafted into the military, he worked on the production of plutonium for the Manhattan Project and, after his discharge in 1946, worked at the Hanford Atomic Energy Project in Richland, Washington. Jess painted in his spare time, and his dismay at the threat of atomic weapons led him to abandon his scientific career and focus on his art.  In 1949, Jess enrolled in the California School of the Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) and, after breaking with his family, began referring to himself simply as "Jess". He met Robert Duncan in 1951 and began a relationship with the poet that lasted until Duncan's death in 1988.  In 1952, in San Francisco, Jess, with Duncan and painter Harry Jacobus, opened the King Ubu Gallery.  Many of Jess's paintings and collages have themes drawn from chemistry, alchemy, the occult, and male beauty, including a series called Translations (1959–1976) which is done with heavily laid-on paint in a paint-by-number style. Collins also created elaborate collages using old book illustrations and comic strips.  Collin's final work, Narkissos, is a complex, beautifully rendered 6'x5' drawing owned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. 

Robert Duncan was an American poet born in Oakland, California in 1919, (d. 1988). In the late 1930s, while studying at the University of California, Berkeley, Duncan began writing poems inspired in part by his left wing politics and acquired a reputation as a bohemian. In 1938, he briefly attended Black Mountain College before moving on to Philadelphia. Following this, he moved to Woodstock, New York, where he joined a commune run by James Cooney and worked on Cooney's magazine The Phoenix. Duncan returned to San Francisco in 1945, and returned to Berkeley to study Medieval and Renaissance literature - cultivating a reputation as a shamanistic figure in San Francisco poetry and artistic circles. His first book Heavenly City Earthly City was published by Bern Porter in 1947. Duncan’s name is prominent in the history of pre-Stonewall gay culture and in the emergence of bohemian socialist communities of the 1930s and 40s, in the Beat Generation, and in the cultural and political upheaval of the 1960s, during which he influenced occult and gnostic circles of the time. During the later part of his life, Duncan's work, published by City Lights and New Directions, came to be distributed worldwide, and his influence as a poet is evident today in both mainstream and avant-garde writing. 

Michael McClure, an American poet, playwright, songwriter, and novelist, was born in Kansas in 1932.  After moving to San Francisco at a young age, he found fame as one of the five poets (including Allen Ginsberg) who read at the famous San Francisco Six Gallery reading in 1955.  He soon became a key member of the Beat Generation and is immortalized as "Pat McLear" in Kerouac's Big Sur.  McClure's first book of poetry, Passage, was published in 1956 by small press publisher Jonathan William.  His poetry is heavily infused with an awareness of nature, especially in the animal consciousness that often lies dormant in humans. McClure famously read selections of his Ghost Tantra poetry series to the caged lions in the San Francisco Zoo. On January 14, 1967, McClure read at the epochal Human Be-In event in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco and transcended his Beat label to become an important member of the 1960s Hippie counterculture. McClure would later court controversy as a playwright with his play The Beard, which was eventually produced in New York. He has made two television documentaries and is featured in several films including The Last Waltz (dir. Martin Scorsese) where he reads from The Canterbury Tales; Beyond the Law (dir. Norman Mailer); and, most prominently, The Hired Hand (dir. Peter Fonda).  McClure was a close friend of The Doors lead singer Jim Morrison and is generally acknowledged as having been responsible for promoting Morrison as a poet.  McClure's journalism has been featured in Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, The L.A. Times and The San Francisco Chronicle. He has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Obie Award for Best Play, an NEA grant, the Alfred Jarry Award and a Rockefeller grant for playwriting.

Jack Micheline, born in New York of Russian-Romanian ancestry in 1929 (d. 1998), was an American painter and poet from the San Francisco Bay Area. His name is synonymous with street artists, underground writers, and "outlaw" poets. One of San Francisco's original Beat poets, he was an innovative artist who was active in the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance of the 1950s and 1960s.  He moved to Greenwich Village in the 1950s, where he became a street poet, drawing on Harlem blues and jazz rhythms and the cadence of word music. He lived on the fringe of poverty, writing about hookers, drug addicts, blue collar workers, and the dispossessed.  In 1957, Troubadour Press published his first book River of Red Wine. Jack Kerouac wrote the introduction, and it was reviewed by Dorothy Parker in Esquire magazine. Micheline relocated to San Francisco in the early 1960s, where he spent the rest of his life. He published over twenty books, some of them mimeographs and chapbooks.  Though a poet of the Beat generation, Micheline characterized the Beat movement as a product of media hustle, and did not want to be categorized as a Beat poet. He was also a painter, working primarily with gouache in a self-taught, primitive