Fran Herndon: Up to the Aether

September 19 - November 1, 2025
Reception Friday, September 19th

Organized by David Abel & Noah Ross

“Away we go with no moon at all” wrote Jack Spicer (1925–1965), in “Car Song,” a poem that would eventually find its way into the book The Heads of the Town up to the Aether. It was probably 1959 or 1960. At Spicer’s urging, Fran Herndon (1926–2020) was taking classes at the California School of Fine Arts, where he had briefly but famously taught. “She took to the litho-stone like a duck to water” (James Herndon, Everything as Expected), while Spicer, drunk, was receiving poems in the Broadway tunnel. The uncanny affinities between the poems and the lithographs are memorialized in “Homage to Creeley,” the first section of Heads of the Town, published by Auerhahn Press in 1962. The friendship of Herndon and Spicer was psychically intensive and instinctively collaborative, as they pulled from each other works that make one believe in the invisible world — see and hear its ghosts, “wet shadows on a stick” (“Who Knew”).

Fran Herndon: Up to the Aether restages this early 60s San Francisco Renaissance moment of poet/artist collaboration. On view are all the lithographs reproduced in Heads of the Town, along with proofs of related lithos rarely if ever seen, drawn collaborative drafts, contemporaneous collages, and other prints and paintings connected to this foundational friendship. Long a favorite of experimental poets and those invested in the artistic traditions of the San Francisco Renaissance, here is Fran Herndon in her own aether — away we go with her.