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 style he picked up in Mexico City. The back room at San Francisco's Abandoned Planet Bookstore (until it was closed) showcased Micheline's wall mural paintings.

Henry Miller was an American writer and painter born in New York City, of German parents, in 1891 (d. 1980). He was known for breaking with existing literary forms and developing a new sort of "novel" that is a mixture of novel, autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, surrealist free association, and mysticism, one that is distinctly always about and expressive of the real-life Henry Miller and yet is also fictional. His most characteristic works of this kind are Tropic of Cancer (1934), Black Spring (1936), and Tropic of Capricorn (1939). In 1930, he moved to Paris and lived there until the outbreak of World War II. Although Miller had little or no money the first year in Paris, things began to change with the meeting of Anaïs Nin who, with Hugh Guiler, paid his rent at Villa Seurat and financed the first printing of Tropic of Cancer in 1934. In late 1931, Miller was employed by the Chicago Tribune (Paris edition) during a period in Paris that proved highly creative for Miller, as he established a significant and influential network of authors circulating around the Villa Seurat. He continued to write novels that were banned; along with Tropic of Cancer, his Black Spring (1936) and Tropic of Capricorn (1939) were smuggled into his native country, building Miller an underground reputation. His books would prove to be a major influence on the new Beat generation of American writers (most notably Jack Kerouac) some of whom would adopt stylistic and thematic principles found in Miller's oeuvre. One of the first acknowledgments of Henry Miller as a major modern writer was by George Orwell in his 1940 essay "Inside the Whale". In 1940, Miller returned to the United States, settling in Big Sur, California. He continued to produce vividly written works that challenged contemporary American cultural values and moral attitudes. He was widely critical of consumerism in America, as reflected in Sunday After The War (1944) and The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (1945). He spent the last years of his life at his home in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles, California. In addition to his literary abilities, Miller produced numerous watercolor paintings and wrote books on this field. It is estimated that Miller painted 2000 watercolors during his life. He was a close friend of the French painter Grégoire Michonze.

Kenneth Patchen was an American poet and novelist, born in Niles, Ohio in 1911 (d. 1972). He first began to develop his interest in literature and poetry while he was in high school, and the New York Times published his first poem while he was still in college. He attended Alexander Meiklejohn's Experimental College (which was part of the University of Wisconsin), in Madison, Wisconsin, for one year, in 1929, but thereafter left school, to travel across the country, taking itinerant jobs in such places as Arkansas, Louisiana and Georgia. Later, Patchen moved to the East Coast, living in New York City and Boston. While in Boston, in 1933, he met Miriam Oikemus at a friend's Christmas party. During the 1930s the couple moved frequently between New York City's Greenwich Village and California, as Patchen struggled to make a living as a writer. His book of poems, First Will and Testament, drew the attention of James Laughlin, then launching New Directions Publishing as a student at Harvard. Laughlin's decision to publish Patchen's work started a friendship and professional relationship that would last for the remainder of both men's careers. As his career progressed, Patchen continued to push himself into more and more experimental styles and forms, developing, along with writers such as Langston Hughes and Kenneth Rexroth, what came to be known as jazz poetry. Patchen first started painting in 1942 to make cover illustrations for his book The Dark Kingdom. Patchen's biographer Larry Smith has noted that Patchen pioneered the concept of the painted book, which used type set to paint the concrete poem on the page. He also devised the drawing-and-poem form, the poetry-prose experiments of his anti-novels, and the picture-poem form. Patchen's literary supporters included Henry Miller and E.E. Cummings. Later, in San Francisco in the 1950s, Patchen became a major influence on the younger Beat poets like Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Dick McBride and also collaborated with jazz bassist Charles Mingus. Although he did not achieve widespread fame during his lifetime, fans and scholars continue to celebrate Patchen's art. He also experimented with his child-like "painted poems," many of which were to be published posthumously in the 1984 collection What Shall We Do Without Us. In Patchen's final years, he and his wife moved to Palo Alto, California, where he created many of his distinctive painted poems, produced while confined to his bed.

Christopher Felver, born in 1946, is an American-born photographer and filmmaker living in California. Felver studied history at the University of Miami and studied film at the London College of Photography. He is best known for his portraiture photography, particularly, his photographs of Beat Generation personalities Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, William Burroughs and Gregory Corso. Felver has shown solo photographic exhibitions at the Torino Fotografia Biennale Internazionale in Torino, Italy in 1989; the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, France in 1994; Fahey/Klein Gallery in Los Angeles, California in 2002; and the Robert Berman Gallery in Los Angeles, California in 2007. In addition to being a prolific photographer, Felver has produced several acclaimed films including West Coast: Beat and Beyond (1984); John Cage Talks about Cows (1987); The Coney Island of Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1996); Donald Judd's Marfa Texas (1998); and Cecil Taylor: All the Notes (2006). His films have been screened at the 53rd Venice International Film Festival, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C, The New York Public Library and the Museum of Fine Art in Boston. Felver's books include The Late Great Allen Ginsberg; Seven Days in Nicaragua Libre; The Poet Exposed; Ferlinghetti Portrait; Angels, Anarchists and Gods; The Importance of Being; and Beat.

John Keating is a Bay Area artist who was born in Philadelphia in 1953.  He studied art in Bucks County before moving to San Francisco in 1974.  He continued his art studies at the San Francisco Art Institute and the Academy of Art. Keating continues to create fluid strong character drawings of literary and famous figures from Hollywood and society.  He has also created many works of his beloved San Francisco.  Keating's art has been published in San Francisco Magazine, Segunda Vista by Random House Small Pond Magazine of Literature, The Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, and Art/Life Magazine, which is archived in the Guggenheim Museum.  John Keating's works are the main feature of the salon at the Rex Hotel in San Francisco.  The Maxwell Hotel featured his picture of Charlie Chaplin in the main lobby and pictures throughout the hotel.  Since 1996, over 35 of his drawings were stolen off the walls in rooms and from elevators in the Maxwell Hotel. He has shown at a variety of venues in San Francisco, such as Vesuvio Bar on Columbus Avenue. Dr. Al Marquez, former head heart surgeon at Stanford Hospital has over 30 of his works, and Hans Gallas, foremost collector of Gertrude Stein memorabilia, has many of Keating's works. In the summer of 2007, his drawings of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas were shown at the San Francisco Jewish Community Center. His drawing of Oscar Wilde hangs in O'Reilly's Irish Bar in North Beach. His portrait of Mark Twain appeared in the movie, Just One Night (2000).

 William Burroughs was an American novelist, poet, essayist and spoken word performer born in 1914 (d. 1997), in St. Louis, Missouri. Burroughs began writing essays and journals in early adolescence. He left home in 1932 to attend Harvard University, studying English, and anthropology as a postgraduate, and later attending medical school in Vienna. After being turned down by the Office of Strategic Services and U.S. Navy in 1942 to serve in World War II, he dropped out and became afflicted with the drug addiction that affected him for the rest of his life, while working a variety of jobs. In 1943, while living in New York City, he befriended Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, the mutually influential foundation of what became the countercultural movement of the Beat Generation. Burroughs wrote 18 novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays, collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, and made many appearances in films. Much of Burroughs's work is semi-autobiographical, primarily drawn from his experiences as a heroin addict, as he lived throughout Mexico City, London, Paris, Berlin, the South American Amazon and Tangier in Morocco. Finding success with his confessional first novel, Junkie (1953), Burroughs is perhaps best known for his third novel Naked Lunch (1959), a work fraught with controversy. With Brion Gysin, he also popularized the literary cut-up technique in works such as The Nova Trilogy (1961-64). In 1983, Burroughs was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and in 1984 was awarded the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France. Jack Kerouac considered him one of the greatest satirical writers, while Norman Mailer thought of him as the only American writer who may be considered a genius.

William Burroughs was an American novelist, poet, essayist and spoken word performer born in 1914 (d. 1997), in St. Louis, Missouri. Burroughs began writing essays and journals in early adolescence. He left home in 1932 to attend Harvard University, studying English, and anthropology as a postgraduate, and later attending medical school in Vienna. After being turned down by the Office of Strategic Services and U.S. Navy in 1942 to serve in World War II, he dropped out and became afflicted with the drug addiction that affected him for the rest of his life, while working a variety of jobs. In 1943, while living in New York City, he befriended Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, the mutually influential foundation of what became the countercultural movement of the Beat Generation. Burroughs wrote 18 novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays, collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, and made many appearances in films. Much of Burroughs's work is semi-autobiographical, primarily drawn from his experiences as a heroin addict, as he lived throughout Mexico City, London, Paris, Berlin, the South American Amazon and Tangier in Morocco. Finding success with his confessional first novel, Junkie (1953), Burroughs is perhaps best known for his third novel Naked Lunch (1959), a work fraught with controversy. With Brion Gysin, he also popularized the literary cut-up technique in works such as The Nova Trilogy (1961-64). In 1983, Burroughs was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and in 1984 was awarded the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France. Jack Kerouac considered him one of the greatest satirical writers, while Norman Mailer thought of him as the only American writer who may be considered a genius.

David Meltzer, who was born in Rochester, New York in 1937, is an American poet and musician of the Beat Generation and San Francisco Renaissance. At the age of 11, he wrote his first poem, on the topic of the New York City subway system. In 1958, he recorded an album of his poems with a jazz combo for Jim Dickson on Dickson's Vaja label. The album was not released at the time, but recognized in 2006 on Sierra Records titled "David Meltzer: Poet with Jazz 1958." In 1968, David Meltzer signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. One of the key poets of the Beat generation, Meltzer is also a jazz guitarist, Cabalist scholar, and the author of more than 50 books of poetry and prose. 2005 saw the publication of David's Copy: The Selected Poems of David Meltzer (edited by Michael Rothenberg and with an introduction by Jerome Rothenberg), which provides a current overview of Meltzer's work. In 1957, he moved to San Francisco and became part of a circle of writers based around Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan. Meltzer's Beat Thing (La Alameda Press) is his epic poem on the Beat generation. Lawrence Ferlinghetti considers him as one of the great poets and musicians of post-World-War II San Francisco. Meltzer came to prominence with inclusion of his work in the anthology, The New American Poetry 1945-1960. Meltzer's other books include, No Eyes, poems on Lester Young, and a book of interviews, San Francisco Beat: Talking with the Poets (City Lights Books).