HSC&A / Artist talk: poems for a postmistress
poems for a postmistress
Artist Talk
With Michael Deyermond & Hannah Sloan
Saturday, November 22
Talk starts: 2:00 PM
Artist reception to follow: 3:00-5:00 PM
5613 San Vicente Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90019
Join us on Saturday, November 22nd for an artist talk with Michael Deyermond and curator Hannah Sloan. We will discuss a collection of Deyermond’s mail art, once processed through the U.S. Postal Service, and now assembled for public exhibition alongside work by George Herms and his circle of Beat Generation artists.
Michael Deyermond is the tragic poet who came West because he thought California could save him. A writer, a bookstore owner with a cult following and a multi-media visual artist, Deyermond's work references Robinson Jeffers, the Beats, William Everson, and all the great poets that dug and mined the Golden State.
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.
Deyermond’s path has included suffering, questioning, and insecurity, accompanied by a bold ego, knowing he has something no one else has. His visual art 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 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.
On Saturday, November 22 at 2pm, Deyermond and curator Hannah Sloan will discuss the artist’s relationship with the work of Beat artists George Herms and Wallace Berman, and the nature of objects that are simultaneously mail and works of art. Join us at HSC&A’s Mid-City headquarters, 5613 San Vicente Boulevard, Los Angeles.
Please RSVP to hannah@hannahsloan.com or click the link below.
poems for a postmistress is co-curated by Hannah Sloan and Craig Krull. Concurrently on view is the mad chapel, a solo presentation of Deyermond’s work at Craig Krull Gallery. This is the artist’s sixth solo exhibition with the gallery and features paintings, sculptural carvings in walnut, and text works pressed into brass. The exhibition is on view November 29, 2025 - January 17, 2026.
Portrait of the artist by Jared Burton
/ About
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.
Featured Artwork:
01. Michael Deyermond, behind every good man, 2003, linoleum print on cardboard, 5.25 x 7.5” (recto)
02. Michael Deyermond, behind every good man, 2003, linoleum print on cardboard, 5.25 x 7.5” (verso)
