Wallace "Wally" Berman (February 18, 1926 – February 18, 1976) was an American experimental filmmaker, assemblage, and collage artist and a crucial figure in the history of post-war California art. Personal life and education Wallace Berman was born in Staten Island, New York in 1926. In the 1930s his family moved to Boyle Heights, Los Angeles. Berman was discharged from high school for gambling in the early 1940s and became involved in the West Coast jazz scene. Berman wrote a song with Jimmy Witherspoon. He attended classes at Jepson Art Institute and Chouinard Art Institute in the 1940s. For a few years from 1949 he worked in a factory finishing furniture. It was at the factory where he began creating sculptures from wood scraps. This led to him becoming a full-time artist by the early 1950s, and to an involvement in the Beat Movement. He married Shirley Morand (aka Shirley Berman) and together they had a son Tosh in 1954. He moved from Los Angeles to San Francisco in late 1957 where he mostly focused on his magazine Semina, which consisted of poetry, photographs, texts, drawings and images assembled by Berman. In 1961, he came back to L.A., then moved to Topanga Canyon in 1965. He started creating his series of Verifax Collages in 1963 or 1964. Director Dennis Hopper, a collector of Berman's work, gave Berman a small role in his 1969 film Easy Rider. He produced work until his sudden death in 1976, in a car accident caused by a drunk driver. Berman had said to his mother as a child he would die on his 50th birthday, and indeed he died February 18, 1976, his fiftieth birthday. Artistic career Berman created Verifax collages, which consist of photocopies of images from magazines and newspapers, mounted onto a flat surface in collage fashion, mixed with occasional solid areas of acrylic paint. To make them, Berman used a Verifax copier (Kodak) machine to copy images which he often juxtaposed in a grid format, creating what the critic Will Fenstermaker called "psychedelic typologies." Berman was influenced by jazz music, rock music, poetry of his Beat circle, Surrealism, Dada, as well as the Kabbalah. Though he was not religious, the influence of the Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism is seen in his collages that included Hebrew letters. These letters also appear in his only film, Aleph. His involvement with the jazz scene allowed