Gerd Stern

Gerd Stern is a poet, painter, sculptor, and multimedia artist born in 1928 in Saarland on the German-French border who emigrated to the United States in 1936 as a refugee from Nazi Germany. He became a prominent figure in the Beat Generation after meeting Allen Ginsberg in a New York psychiatric institute in the late 1940s, and later co-founded USCO, a multimedia art collective that pioneered psychedelic performances and kinetic art installations throughout the 1960s.