Tony Berlant

Anthony Hanna Berlant was born in New York City in 1941. His exact birth date has not been widely published. He moved to Los Angeles with his family when he was about five, according to ARTnews, and attended high school in the area. As a senior he drove across Los Angeles and Pasadena to visit galleries and museums, a period he later remembered as the last heyday of Abstract Expressionism. "As soon as I had a car, I didn't go to the beach," he told UCLA's magazine in 2018. "I went to the museums and around to every gallery." He first experimented with collaging tin while still in high school. From childhood he also collected mineral specimens and fossils, an early sign of the collector he would become.

Berlant attended the University of Southern California for one year in 1959, then transferred to the University of California, Los Angeles. There the painter William Brice placed him in an upper-level class taught by visiting artist Richard Diebenkorn. He earned three degrees in three years: a Bachelor of Arts in 1961, a Master of Arts in painting in 1962 and a Master of Fine Arts in sculpture in 1963.

While Berlant was still a student, Clement Greenberg chose one of his paintings for an exhibition of Los Angeles artists at LACMA (dated 1960 by L.A. Louver and 1961 by the Los Angeles Times). In 1963 he appeared in "Pop Art USA" at the Oakland Art Museum with Rauschenberg, Warhol and Oldenburg, and in 1964 LACMA's Contemporary Art Council awarded him its New Talent Purchase Grant. Between 1962 and 1966 his work was shown at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Whitney Museum and LACMA. He taught at UCLA from 1965 to 1969.

Tin became his primary medium in 1963, when he began collecting metal advertising signs from a nearby corner market. He collaged found and later custom-printed tin onto wood with thousands of steel brads, producing wall works, house forms and cubes. A major early piece, The Marriage of New York and Athens (1966 to 1968), was the subject of a 1974 Whitney Museum publication. His commission Baba's Door (1988) forms a side door of Spalding House in Honolulu.

He was associated with the Ferus Gallery's Cool School and worked between Los Angeles and New York. In the 1980s he was represented by Xavier Fourcade in New York. He joined L.A. Louver for a group show in 1981 and had his first solo show there in 1982, coinciding with a major LACMA exhibition and a show at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. He went on to 18 more solo shows and 42 group exhibitions at L.A. Louver, including Close to Home (2014) and a 2025 survey of house constructions made between 1966 and 2019. Solo museum shows also took place at the Whitney (1973), the Centro Cultural de Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City (1988) and The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu (2003). His 2018 show Fast Forward at Kohn Gallery in Hollywood included a towering collaged-metal self-portrait based on a 1970s Polaroid taken by Andy Warhol.

Berlant built major collections of Navajo (Diné) weavings, Native American pottery and early human objects such as hand axes and figure stones. He sold objects to artist friends and helped shape the Navajo blanket collections of Frank Stella, Donald Judd, Joseph Cornell and Andy Warhol. In the early 1970s James Turrell introduced him to archaeologist Steven LeBlanc, and the two founded the Mimbres Foundation, a Los Angeles based conservancy protecting vulnerable sites along the Mimbres River Valley in New Mexico. The foundation also assembled the first photographic archive of known Mimbres figurative pottery, now maintained by the University of New Mexico. Berlant argued that a small number of artists painted most Mimbres pottery and identified one prolific painter he called the "Rabbit Master." He worked with LACMA (1972, 2018) and the Palm Springs museum (1990) on Native American art exhibitions and catalogues, and from 2002 he was a research affiliate at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University. In 2018 he co-curated First Sculpture: Handaxe to Figure Stone with Thomas Wynn at the Nasher Sculpture Center and Decoding Mimbres Painting: Ancient Ceramics of the American Southwest with Evan Maurer at LACMA. In spring 2026 L.A. Louver showed Navajo blankets from his collection.

Berlant met Helen Méndez, a performer and set designer who worked with the playwright Guy de Cointet, at a party in Detroit in the 1970s. Ten years later he saw her again at a party in Los Angeles, leaning against one of his sculptures, and recognized her at once. They married in 1985 and made their home and his studio in Santa Monica, where their only child, the comedian, actor and writer Kate Berlant, was born and raised. Friends including Frank Gehry, Ed Moses, Chris Burden and Ken Price were regulars at the family's dinner parties. Kate Berlant has described her father as shy but a natural storyteller and "the hardest working person" she knows. His brother is Jeff Berlant.

Berlant believed that Los Angeles kept the experimental spirit of the 1960s. "My New York friends tend to think of the '60s as a kind of golden moment that's now been erased by commercial focus," he told the Los Angeles Times in 2018. "But I think L.A. is [still that]. It never left." He described the houses, doorways and windows in his work as metaphors for "transitions between life and death, the secular and spiritual world," and said artists "work from inner need, necessity, ideally."

Berlant is remembered as a seminal figure of West Coast Pop and as the artist who turned printed tin and nails into a painterly language. His work is in the collections of LACMA, the Hammer Museum, MOCA Los Angeles, The Huntington, SFMOMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Whitney, the Hirshhorn and the Honolulu Museum of Art, among others. Through the Mimbres Foundation and his scholarship he also helped protect and interpret ancient Southwestern pottery.

LACMA Contemporary Art Council New Talent Purchase Grant (1964). Ars Longa Award from the Ethnic Arts Council of Los Angeles (2019). Research Affiliate, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University (from 2002).

Books and catalogues include Tony Berlant: The Marriage of New York and Athens (Whitney Museum, 1974); Tony Berlant: Recent Work (Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, 1982); Mimbres Pottery: Ancient Art of the American Southwest (1983, introduction by Berlant); Tony Berlant: Recent Work 1982 to 1987 (Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, 1987); Navajo Blankets from the Collection of Tony Berlant (Palm Springs Desert Museum, 1991); First Sculpture: Handaxe to Figure Stone (with Thomas Wynn, 2018); and Decoding Mimbres Painting: Ancient Ceramics of the American Southwest (with Evan Maurer and Julia Burtenshaw, 2018). L.A. Louver produced several films about him, including Tony Berlant: Close to Home (2014). His daughter Kate Berlant has spoken about growing up in the family home in her comedy, including a recent HBO special.

Tony Berlant died on Tuesday, October 27, 2026, at the age of 85, after a long battle with Alzheimer's disease, the Los Angeles Times reported. Some listings, including Wikipedia, give October 28, the date the news was published. L.A. Louver confirmed the death and said: "We will miss Tony beyond words." He is survived by his wife Helen, daughter Kate and brother Jeff. Funeral and burial details have not been made public.