poems for a postmistress
November 22, 2025 - January 10, 2026
Artist & Curator Talk: Saturday, November 22, 2 PM
Reception for the artist to follow: 3-5 PM
5613 San Vicente Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90019
Press Release
Hannah Sloan Curatorial & Advisory in collaboration with Craig Krull Gallery, is pleased to present, poems for a postmistress, works by George Herms and Michael Deyermond, with a special selection of correspondence and vintage photographs from the collection of Marvin Silver. The exhibition will be on view from November 22, 2025 - January 10, 2026.
Emily Dickinson penciled words and poetic thoughts on small scraps of envelopes, tucking them into the big pocket of her white cotton dress as she ambled about her home in Amherst. The triangular flaps, or cut and flattened envelopes, are geometric shapes as simple and profound as an Ellsworth Kelly. The care Dickinson took in “recycling” the letters she received demonstrates her respect for these objects as carriers of communication and ideas.
U.S. mail evolved significantly during Dickinson’s lifetime. According to media historian John Durham Peters, “By the late 1850s, it was possible to mail a letter sealed in an envelope, paid for with a pre-purchased stamp, and dropped into a public box,” ensuring a system of privacy that had previously been unexpected. – Tthe fluidity and volume of American letter writing subsequently became a key component of our most intimate history.
Many now regret that the Digital Age has nearly eradicated letter writing altogether, and that personal communication has become abbreviated, acronymed, emojified, and often lost in the flow of erased emails. A 2021 CBS poll found that 37% of adults had not written a personal letter in over five years. Though this valuable archiving of lives and loves has become almost obsolete, several artists have relished the unique opportunities and properties of the mail (particularly Conceptual artists from the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s) who recognized the inherent value of processing ideas through this system.
Between 1955 and 1964, West Coast Beat Generation artist Wallace Berman disseminated his Semina “magazine” of collage and poetry exclusively through the mail. Ray Johnson “founded” the New York Correspondence School in 1962, becoming the leader of an artistic movement—his first artistic mailings instructing recipients to “add to and return, or send to” someone else. Among the most iconic mail art projects, Eleanor Antin’s 100 Boots unfolded through a series of photo postcards that followed one hundred rubber boots as they embarked on whimsical adventures across America.
poems for a postmistress pairs the work of two contemporary artists who have explored the nature of what it means to post an item through the system, and how those postcards, letters, and stamps become art objects.
George Herms, a legendary nexus of the California Beat Generation, has been making assemblages and collages of rusted detritus and cultural residue since the 1950s. Herms was a close friend of Wallace Berman, who taught him that “any object, even a mundane castoff, could be of great interest if contextualized properly.” Both artists approached their artmaking from a spiritual or soulful perspective, recognizing a tenderness in the well-worn object that reflects the double entendre of “beat” as both exhausted and a beatific state of bliss.
Over the course of two years, from 2006 to 2008, the Getty Research Institute processed, catalogued and collected the papers of George Herms for their permanent archives. Getty associate Sarah Anderson opened hundreds of his letters, saving the pertinent material and tossing the envelopes and other “unnecessary” items into the waste bin. In typical Herms fashion—and in rhythm with Emily Dickinson—he understood the value of those old postmarked, letterhead envelopes from galleries and museums, stained with the acid of brown cardboard boxes. The geometric patterning of those stains possessed the same aesthetic presence and manifestation of paper history as Dickinson’s flattened envelopes. Herms then assembled collages from these castaways, creating further layers of time and shape, finally adding his signature L-O-V-E rubber stamps to the four corners.
Michael Deyermond’s mail art project also reflects the poetic nature of both Dickinson and Wallace Berman. After a rebellious childhood, in an effort to save himself, Deyermond wrote his way into Phillips Academy Andover—one of the most prestigious prep schools in the United States. While his classmates became surgeons, lawyers, and heads of commerce, Michael pursued his literary passion of becoming a poet and traveled across the country, like Kerouac, to California.
Like many poets, Deyermond’s path included suffering, questioning, and insecurity, accompanied by a bold ego, knowing he has something no one else has. He owned a bookstore on Abbot Kinney in Venice called Equator Books— a sparsely populated bookshops, stocked only with books he deemed worthy, and his clientele clamoring for his recommendations. His visual art—the subject of six solo exhibitions at Craig Krull Gallery—is often installation-oriented, featuring wooden benches and obelisks carved with potent words, boats beached on mounds of sand, and paintings on raw canvas that address loneliness, rejection, relationships, and always the dream that “California could save me.”
Deyermond’s mail art was created during a tumultuous time in the early 2000s–the majority of it addressed to a dear friend in Bolinas, California, in care of his “Postmistress.” Expressive, hand-painted or linocut words on rough hewn cardboard read “please don’t ever give up on me,” “god I turn me on,” “Suicide now with glory,” alongside typewritten poetic stanzas like, “what would it be like if los angeles had real snow or real stars and the rest of the world had us.” The work radiates the desperation and hope of a poet laying his soul bare on postcards that are not protected by envelopes as they pass through the hands of strangers en route to their intended recipient. But like Dickinson, Berman, and especially Herms, there is always love—L-O-V-E. On the back of one card he wrote, “Wallace Berman was a rocket man. xo md.”
We are also thrilled to include an extraordinary and rare selection of vintage photographs, handwritten correspondence and original mail art from the collection of acclaimed photographer, Marvin Silver, documenting the fertile period of West Coast correspondence history of the 1960s. Included in this treasure trove are works by Herms, Wallace Berman, original copies of the literary journal, Semina, and intimate photographs by Marvin Silver of Herms and his family.
Please join us for an Artist & Curator Talk with Michael Deyermond and Hannah Sloan at 2:00 PM on Saturday, November 22, at HSC&A’s Mid-City headquarters, 5613 San Vicente Boulevard, Los Angeles.
_______
George Herms (b. 1935, Woodland, CA) is widely recognized as one of the founding figures of West Coast assemblage. Since the 1950s, he has created sculpture, painting, collage, installations, and performance with found materials. Herms has exhibited extensively and is represented in major museum collections. He has been awarded three National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, the Prix de Rome, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Award, and a Getty Research Institute Fellowship.
Michael Deyermond (b. 1972, Rochester, NY) is a poet and artist whose work bridges literature and visual art. A graduate of Phillips Academy Andover and Franklin & Marshall College, Deyermond’s installations and drawings are held in the collections of The Getty, the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection, UCLA’s Clark Library, and the Center for the Study of Political Graphics. He lives and works between Los Angeles and Cloverdale, CA.