Considered by many to have been the father of the Californian assemblage movement, Wallace Berman was an active member of the San Francisco and Los Angeles Beat communities in the mid-1950s. The verifax machine, a precursor of the photocopy machine, lent the name to the series of collages with which Berman continuously experimented. The series is unified by an image of a hand holding a transistor radio, appropriated from a magazine. Inside the frame of each radio, the artist superimposed imagery—people, objects and symbols, often taken from pop culture—pertinent to that particular sequence of the work.
