"Exploring Jess: Beat Generation Visionary"

Ashamed about his role in creating the atom bomb, Burgess Franklin Collins (“Jess”) (1923-2004), left his career as a radiochemist. Rejecting mid-century society’s expectations of living in the suburbs and working a corporate job, he chose, instead, to try his hand as an artist. Jess’s new bohemian lifestyle, marriage to poet Robert Duncan, and residence in San Francisco placed him within the Beatnik literary counterculture movement (1950s-1960s).  Providing new insight into this intersection between the Beats’ written word and Jess’s visual art, this exhibition demonstrates how Jess used the power of the arts as refuge from mainstream society, creating alternative worlds as an escape from current events.

Divided into four sections, this exhibition traces Jess’s role in the Bay Area countercultural scene. Jess and Robert Duncan: The Nexus of Production explores the married life of the couple and their home as a creative safe space. Collage Against Materialism focuses on Jess’s collages that repurpose thrifted materials, challenging the consumerism of 1950s and 1960s. Jess’s collaborations with Beat writers and San Francisco creatives are examined in Words and Pictures. Finally, “Indwelling” through Painting demonstrates Jess’s ability to create his own world through his painting practice.  Exploring Jess: Beat Generation Visionary invites visitors to see Jess as an artist who transformed intimacy, collaboration, and reuse into a radical creative practice, building a deeply personal world that quietly resisted the cultural conformism of his time.

The exhibition includes loans from Tibor de Nagy Gallery; the Jess Collins Trust; Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; and The Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University of Buffalo, The State University of New York.