November 29 – January 17, 2026
Opening Reception: December 6, 4–6pm
Artist Talk: January 17, 2025, 11am
Michael Deyermond is the quintessential tragic poet who came to the West because he thought California could save him. A writer, a bookstore owner with a cult following and a multi-media visual artist, Deyermond's artwork references Robinson Jeffers, the Beat generation, William Everson, all the great poets that dug and mined the Golden State. His new exhibition at Craig Krull Gallery, the mad chapel, equates his soul-searching with the divine, a rare level of profound beatitude that poet Gregory Corso declared was attributable only to Kerouac and Shelley.
This exhibition features paintings, sculptural carvings into walnut, and text pressed into brass, one of them in the shape of a tombstone with the words "on the occasion of my death as an unknown artist." the mad chapel also includes a thick black walnut book hand-carved with the words, "I came so close to god it was art." Like Kerouac, he struggles with demons, like Quixote he tilts at windmills, like many poets there is doubt and fear, but there is always everlasting hope.