‘Tosh: Growing Up in Wallace Berman’s World’

Editor’s note: We regret to inform you that the January 15 event featuring author Tosh Berman, special guest Garrett Caples, and host John Freeman in discussion about Tosh: Growing Up in Wallace Berman’s World has been canceled due to illness. We hope you’ve enjoyed reading this memoir of a boyhood among artists in Topanga Canyon, and we’ll see you next month on February 19 at 5 p.m. Pacific for a conversation about Greg Sarris’s Grand Avenue: A Novel in Stories.

In Tosh: Growing Up in Wallace Berman’s World, the author recounts his unusual early life as the son of Beat artist Wallace Berman, who was known as the “father” of assemblage art, and his wife and muse, Shirley Berman, during the tail end of the Beat era and at the height of hippie counterculture. Tosh Berman grew up in various places in the Bay Area and Southern California, particularly Topanga, surrounded by artists, actors, and musicians. Full of observations, reflections, character studies, and black-and-white photographs, the book shares encounters with the actor Dean Stockwell, his father’s longtime friend, as well as Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, Toni Basil, Russ Tamblyn, Dennis Hopper, the Rolling Stones, Brian Jones, and Neil Young, among many others. The result is a vivid portrait of an artistic and eccentric milieu that had an outsize role in 20th-century art, but it is also an account of growing up sensitive to all kinds of art—music, in particular.