Gerard Malanga

Gerard Malanga, a longtime member of the New York avant-garde movement, was born in the Bronx and attended Manhattan’s School of Industrial Art. He was introduced to poetry by his twelfth-grade English teacher and continued to study poetry at the Cincinnati College of Art and Design, but he dropped out in less than a year. He later attended Wagner College on a scholarship anonymously donated for the express purpose of advancing his poetic career. During the summer of his second year at Wagner, he was hired as an assistant by Andy Warhol. Malanga dropped out of Wagner the following semester to be able to work with Warhol full-time. He helped Warhol produce screenprints and acted in many of his movies, including Bufferin (1967), in which he reads some of his own poetry. In addition to poetry, Malanga has produced several books of photography, the most famous of which are nudes of prominent people such as Iggy Pop.