Jon Davies is a Montreal-based curator, writer and scholar. Davies has worked as Assistant Curator at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Associate Curator at Oakville Galleries, and curated independent projects. His writing on film, video and contemporary art has been widely published. He is the author of Trash: A Queer Film Classic (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2009) and editor of Colin Campbell: More Voice-Over (Concordia University Press, 2021). He received his PhD in Art History from Stanford University and his dissertation is titled “The Fountain: Art, Sex and Queer Pedagogy in San Francisco, 1945-1995.”

Helen Adam (Scottish, 1909–1993) was a poet, collagist, photographer and actress who was part of the San Francisco Renaissance. After attending Edinburgh University for two years, Adam and her sister and frequent collaborator Pat Adam worked as journalists in London before moving to the US in 1939, living in Connecticut, New York and eventually settling in San Francisco in 1949. Adam inspired many poets and artists, including Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan and Jess, to explore the ballad tradition that was part of her Scottish context. While Adam would write carefully crafted, supernatural ballads in their traditional form, she merged this Victorian sensibility with a modern consciousness that emerged from her postwar culture. Adam was one of only four women poets to be included in the influential 1960 poetry anthology The New American Poetry 1945–1960, edited by Donald Allen. In 1964, Adam moved to New York where she performed her ballads with Patti Smith, Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman. In addition to her numerous books of poetry and prose, Adam and her sister wrote a ballad-opera, San Francisco’s Burning (1963) and produced two experimental films.

Bruce Conner (American, 1933–2008) was a conceptual artist of the postwar era and member of the San Francisco Beat movement. His films, collages and sculptural assemblages reflect his fascination with mortality and the grotesque. Conner’s work touches on various themes of postwar American society, from a rising consumer culture to the dread of nuclear apocalypse. His inspiration often came from Surrealist artwork and Victorian-era aesthetics, resulting in a juxtaposition of form and content, fact and fiction. An early practitioner of found-object assemblage, his relief and free-standing sculptural objects, such as CHILD (1959) and LOOKING GLASS (1964), were widely recognized for their masterful compositions and dark subject matter. Equally a pioneer of avant-garde filmmaking, Conner developed a quick-cut method of editing that defined his work. Incorporating footage from a variety of sources—countdown leader, training films and newsreels—to which he added his own 16mm film footage, Conner’s films also focus on disturbing contemporary themes.

Robert Duncan (American, 1919–1988) was an American artist and poet who played an important role in both the Black Mountain school of poetry, led by Charles Olson, and the San Francisco Renaissance, whose other members included Jack Spicer and Robin Blaser. Duncan attended the University of California, Berkeley (1936–38 and 1948–50), edited the Experimental Review from 1938 to 1940 and traveled widely thereafter, lecturing on poetry in the US and Canada throughout the 1950s. Duncan returned to Berkeley in 1946, where the poetry scene was developing into what would soon be called the San Francisco Renaissance: Spicer and Blaser were together devising their concept of a “serial form” for poems linked by repeating themes, images and phrases. Duncan’s poetry is evocative and highly musical and uses a rich fabric of associations and images whose meanings are sometimes obscure. Myths and a visionary mysticism inform much of his poetry and artwork, though his thematic concerns also include strong social and political statements. His poems were collected in The Years as Catches: First Poems, 1939–1946 (1966), Derivations: Selected Poems, 1950–56(1968), The Opening of the Field (1960), Roots and Branches (1964), Bending the Bow (1968) and Ground Work (1984). He lived in San Francisco with his life partner, the artist Jess.

Artist, illustrator and writer Russell Richard FitzGerald (American, 1932–1978) was born in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and studied at the Philadelphia Museum School of Art in the early 1950s. In 1957, he moved to San Francisco where he was adopted into the group of avant-garde artists in North Beach that defined the 1950s San Francisco Renaissance, including poets Robin Blaser, Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer, with whom FitzGerald had a formative and creatively fruitful relationship. FitzGerald married Dora Dull (née Geissler) and they lived in New York with Dora’s young twin daughters in the 1960s before moving to Vancouver in 1970. There, they swiftly became part of the local literary scene along with Blaser, George Stanley and Stan Persky, who they knew from their time in North Beach, and FitzGerald exhibited at a handful of salons as well as the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Arts Club. FitzGerald was born Catholic and his art often incorporates religious iconography, reflecting his intensive grappling with spirituality, mysticism and mythology. FitzGerald’s work also dramatizes his sexuality, struggles with addiction and his passion for Black men and Black culture, including jazz. He was greatly influenced by William Blake, often combining imagery with text. As an illustrator, FitzGerald’s work appeared on the covers of science fiction books—notably those by his friend Samuel R. Delany—and magazines. Despite his efforts, FitzGerald did not enter the mainstream art world in the United States or Canada, remaining virtually unknown outside of a few select circles, and his visionary, anti-modernist work is not part of any artistic canon. FitzGerald’s final journal entry tells of a final trip to San Francisco and an ensuing “alcoholic fugue.” One month later he died at the age of 45 on March 30, 1978.

Fran Herndon (American, 1926–2020) was a printmaker, collagist and painter best known for her association with the central poets of the San Francisco Renaissance. Trained at the California School of Fine Arts (later known as the San Francisco Art Institute) in printmaking and painting, Herndon is known for her lithographs and collages, many of which were produced in tandem with Jack Spicer’s poetry, intended for joint viewing and reading. Herndon later embraced drawing and pastels after an artistic hiatus during the 1970s. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions dating back to at least 1963, during which her Grail Series works appeared at the Peacock Gallery, San Francisco. Herndon held solo exhibitions in 2011 at Altman Siegel Gallery, Canessa Park Gallery and The Apartment. For most of her career, Herndon had no dealer and rarely sold her work, so her reputation was greatest among fellow artists and poets; she was later represented by Altman Siegel, San Francisco.

Jess (American, 1923–2004) was a San Francisco-based collage artist and painter. He was born in Long Beach, California and trained as a chemist before being drafted into the military. Jess spent three years at the Atomic Energy Laboratory where he played a small part in the Manhattan Project to develop the first atom bomb. In 1946, Jess was discharged from the military and soon after having an apocalyptic dream, renounced his science career. Jess enrolled in the California School of Fine Arts in 1948 and soon met poet Robert Duncan, who would become his lifelong partner and frequent collaborator. They were an influential force in the San Francisco artistic community, bringing together painters and poets, and organizing exhibitions and readings. Jess’s early work is influenced by his CSFA teachers, painters Clyfford Still, David Park and William Corbett. He later became known for his “paste-up” technique, a method of making intricate and elaborate collage and “copies” of Victorian illustrations. Jess’s extensive collage work draws on themes such as eroticism, the male body, the occult, chemistry and alchemy, and often used old book illustrations, comics and print advertising as material. Jess worked reclusively and prolifically on paintings and paste-ups throughout his lifetime.

Joanne Kyger (American, 1934–2017) was born in Vallejo, California and was associated with the poets of the San Francisco Renaissance. Kyger studied philosophy and literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara, moving to San Francisco in 1957 just before finishing her degree. In San Francisco she attended the Sunday meetings of Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan, and moved into the East West House, a communal house for students of Zen Buddhism and Asian studies. Influenced by her Buddhist studies as well as by the Black Mountain School and San Francisco poets, Kyger’s work was mindful of daily events and the northern California landscape; her poems frequently used form and shape as organic outgrowths of their subject matter. Kyger published more than twenty collections of poetry, including The Tapestry and the Web (1965), All This Every Day (1975), The Wonderful Focus of You (1979), Going On: Selected Poems 1958–1980 (1983), Just Space, poems 1979–1989 (1991), Again: Poems 1989–2000 (2001), As Ever: Selected Poems (2002) and About Now: Collected Poems (2007). Kyger lived in Bolinas, California and occasionally taught at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Colorado.

William McNeil (American, 1935–1984) was an American painter, sculptor, printmaker and educator who studied with Franz Kline at Black Mountain College. Following his studies, McNeill left for New York to pursue architecture and then San Francisco to write poetry before briefly moving to Japan to practice Zen Buddhism. McNeill returned to the Bay Area and became part of the San Francisco Renaissance literary and artistic circle, pursuing painting and specializing in depicting poppies. He died of AIDS in 1984.