Where to Go, What Do Do, When You Are Bern Porter : A Personal Biography

A short, round-faced man with a drooping mouth walks slowly along a downtown sidewalk in Belfast, Maine, his long white hair plowed straight back in distinct furrows. His hunched figure and frayed clothes make him stand out among the scrubbed summer tourists. Other people pass and greet him by name: "Hello, Bern!" At the top of Main Street, he walks across to the Belfast Post Office, heading directly for the lobby wastebasket. Here, he harvests a sheaf of catalogues and discarded advertisements, produces a pair of scissors from a pocket, and begins transforming this "junk" into art.
Bern Porter has done this all of his life, finding art and meaning in things other people ignore. He was born on Valentine's Day, 1911, in Porter Settlement, near the Canadian border, in Maine's northernmost county, an area known for its timber, potatoes, and depth of snow. He spent his childhood cutting up newspapers, rearranging the words and pictures, pasting them into books, and trading those books for eggs, milk, and cheese. As he grew older - attending Colby College and Brown University (where he earned a degree in physics), working on the Manhattan Project, then the Saturn moon rocket project - Porter continued to make these "Artists Books," refining the idea into his singular vision of "Founds": combinations of mass media images and text that he uses to reflect American culture as in a funny-house mirror: twisted but true.
In 1945 when the U.S. dropped an atom bomb on Hiroshima, he and his fellow Manhattan Project scientists learned exactly what they had been building, and the knowledge turned Porter away from military applications of science toward art and culture. Porter had begun publishing many important writers at this time, including Henry Miller, Robert Duncan, and Kenneth Patchen. In 1947 he opened a gallery in Sausalito, California, that exhibited what was new in abstract and surreal art, as well as providing a forum for poetry readings and performance art.
In the late 1960s, Porter returned to Maine; ran, unsuccessfully, for governor, and started his own "think tank" for "drop-outs," The Institute for Advanced Thinking. Entering his ninth decade, and still living in Maine, he continues to publish new voices and create his extraordinary books of "Founds."

James Schevill is professor emeritus at Brown University.