Gerd Stern

Gerd Stern is a poet and multimedia artist with a background in both film and video. He emigrated to the United States as a refugee from Hitler in 1936 and later studied at the City College of New York and briefly at Black Mountain College. During the 1950s he befriended Beat poets such as Carl Solomon and Allen Ginsberg and was an active participant in the San Francisco art scene. He lived on a barge in Sausalito, worked as manager for Harry Partch and Maya Angelou, and hosted jam sessions with Chet Baker and other jazz musicians. He worked at public radio station KPFA and was a publicity agent and journalist, writing for Playboy and other magazines. Stern cofounded USCO, a cooperative group of artists, poets, filmmakers, engineers, and composers, and was president of the public company Intermedia Systems Corporation, which helped arrange and coordinate Woodstock in 1969. Gerd Stern’s first show of electronic sculptures and collages was held at Allan Stone Gallery in 1962. In 1963 his one-person exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art featured the multimedia performance Who R U & What’s Happening?, which was also performed at the University of British Columbia with a lecture by Marshall McLuhan. He has published several books of poetry, including First Poems and Others, 1952; Afterimage, 1965, a serigraphed selection with drawings by David Weinrib; Conch Tales, 1984; Fragments, 2002; and WhenThen, 2018. An oral history of Stern was published by the University of California, Berkeley, in 2002. Stern has been an artist in residence at DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) in Berlin, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Omaha, Nebraska, and the Emily Harvey Foundation in Venice, Italy. The Stanford University Library acquired Stern’s papers in 2013.