Tony Berlant, Master of Nail-Fixed Metal Collage, Dies at 85

Tony Berlant, the artist best known for large-scale collages assembled from shards of printed metal and thousands of nails, has died at 85. The Los Angeles Times reported the death, and L.A. Louver, his gallery of more than four decades, confirmed it.

Berlant occupied an unusual corner of West Coast Pop art. His raw material was other people's discards: vintage metal signs, cut into fragments, collaged onto flat surfaces and three-dimensional shapes such as houses and cubes, and pinned down nail by nail. The results resemble quilts built from industrial scrap, if quilts came from hardware stores.

How did the metal works begin?

Berlant was born in New York City in 1941 and moved to Los Angeles with his family at age five. He graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1961, then earned master's degrees in painting (1962) and sculpture (1963). His early Pop-inflected works took a different form: real clothing painted with enamel and glued to canvases. By 1964, he had switched to his signature material, found metal signage, and never really left it.

The attention came fast. Between 1962 and 1966, his work appeared in exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Whitney Museum in New York, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He began showing with L.A. Louver in 1984, a relationship that lasted the rest of his career.

In recent years, Berlant added a personal register to the industrial one, printing his own photographs onto the metal grounds of his collages. The move gave the works an autobiographical dimension they hadn't previously advertised.

What was his second career as a collector?

Berlant was also a serious collector of Native American art and artifacts. His interests spanned Mimbres pottery from southwestern New Mexico — he was a founding member of the Mimbres Foundation, a conservancy group — and prehistoric stone tools.

The scholarship followed the collecting. In 2018, two of his books appeared: First Sculpture: Handaxe to Figure Stone, published by the Nasher Sculpture Center and coauthored with anthropologist Thomas Wynn, and Decoding Mimbres Painting: Ancient Ceramics of the American Southwest, published by Prestel and written with Evan Maurer and Julia Burtenshaw. Few Pop-adjacent artists end up with two academic monographs in a single year. Berlant did.

He lived in Santa Monica, California. He is survived by his wife, performance artist and set designer Helen Méndez; his daughter, comedian and actress Kate Berlant; and a brother, Jeff Berlant.

No memorial plans were announced. Given that Berlant spent six decades fastening fragments of the past into permanent objects, any tribute will have a ready-made vocabulary.