Fran Herndon


Fran Herndon is an American artist associated with the central poets of the San Francisco Renaissance. Trained at the California School of Fine Arts in print-making and painting, Herndon is known for her lithographs and collages, many of which were produced in tandem with Jack Spicer's poetry, and intended for joint viewing and reading. More recently, Herndon has branched out to work in drawing and pastels.
Herndon's work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions dating back to at least 1963, during which Herndon's "Grail Series" works were a part of the group exhibit, Exhibit. More recently, Herndon has had three solo shows in 2011 at Altman Siegel Gallery, Canessa Park Gallery, and The Apartment. In 2010, her work was part of the group exhibition, Breathless Days 1959-1960: A Chronotropic Experiment, at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery. For most of her career, Herndon had no dealer and rarely sold her work, and her reputation was therefore greatest amongst fellow artists and poets. Her silence is typical of the artistic circles she ran in: San Francisco being far off the art map, San Francisco artists indulged in a kind of "nihilism," rarely "took any precautions to preserve their work," and "ocumentation was unheard of." Since 2011 she has been represented by the Altman Siegel Art Gallery.

Early life and work

Born in North Carolina and of Native American ancestry, Herndon lived for a time in France, where she met her then-husband Jim Herndon. The Herndons settled in San Francisco, where they had two children: Jay Herndon and Jack Herndon. It was in San Francisco that she met the central poets associated with the San Francisco Renaissance: Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser, Robert Duncan, and Jess. More specifically, they were the poets of the Berkeley Renaissance, which was later "absorbed into a broader aesthetic, geographical, and temporal movement called the San Francisco Renaissance", alongside the clashing Beat aesthetics of Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Philip Whalen. Her tutelage under and collaborations with Jack Spicer, in particular, resulted in various lithographs created in tandem with Spicer's poetry. His verse "allowed the poetry he wrote while working with Herndon to grow flat, more literal, incantatory, till it approaches the emotionally numb."

Artistic practices

Alongside fellow artists such as Helen Adam, Paul Alexander, Jess and Tom Field, Herndon contributed to the development of a socially engaged school of art in California that "challenged the values of the East Coast School of Abstract Expressionism." The visual and literary arts were crucial to creating local, West Coast and Bay Area variants of modernism. Her work has been described as one of "quiet " and linked, in that way, to other West Coast artists connected to the San Francisco Renaissance such as Harry Jacobus, Jess Collins, Paul Alexander, and Tom Field.

An example of Herndon's early work is her series of collages made in 1963 based on Sports Illustrated. These collages were later published as a part of Jim Herndon's memoirs of the collaboration between Herndon and Jack Spicer, Everything as Expected. Herndon continues to be invested in the convergence of the written and visual arts: her prints continue to be best viewed with "their intended volume of poetry" and her collages often make use of "clipped text swirling about in a manner somewhere between that of Richard F. Outcault's Yellow Kid comics and Richard Hamilton's similar collages."
Spicer impressed upon Herndon his own poetic strategies of "applying practical magic and using allegory to express the existential conflict and social upheaval that was central to the artistic ground swell of the Beat movement" which she, in turn, absorbed and put to use in her own practices of painting and printmaking. As her artistic practice matured, Fran Herndon became Spicer's closest collaborator. In an interview with Lewis Ellingham, she saiid that "He saw in me something greater than I'' saw in myself – I think." Writing for SFMOMA's OpenSpace project, Norma Cole stated that "Jack would come over to Fran and Jim Herndon's place in the evening and read the new poems to them. During the day Fran would walk up to the San Francisco Art Institute and create the beautiful, mysterious lithographs that would be in the book with the poems." The close relationships between Herndon's practice and poetic practices, and between Herndon the artist and the many poets who at one point or another drew upon ideas coming out of the San Francisco Renaissance is apparent. At Herndon's 2012 solo exhibition at Vancouver's Blanket Gallery, for example, curator Lee Plested organised a special poetry reading including Meredith Quartermain, Gary Thomas Morse, Robin Blaser's partner, David Farwell, and George Stanley, whose 2003 poetry collection, "A Tall, Serious Girl" features Herndon's painting, "Eye on the Sea." Her works continue to be curated and shown by poets such as Kevin Killian, just as she began her career by "showing at the experimental "poets' galleries" of the period."

Editorial work

In 1959, Herndon served as the art editor of the poetry/art magazine J, often credited as the first journal of the "mimeo revolution and the harbinger of hundreds of successors in the 60s and 70s." The magazine was produced by Spicer via mimeograph in San Francisco. Herndon's contribution to the magazine was crucial: its "playful, even colorful, formal character thanks to Fran Herndon, who edited the artwork for the magazine" in combination with an "uncompromising editorial stance" led to J's establishment as a "representative of the best of the mimeograph revolution." Together, Spicer and Herndon edited the first five issues of the magazine. J was named after the Herndons' first son, Jay.

Solo exhibitions