Vexing: Female Voices of East LA Punk

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May 17 – August 31, 2008 at the Claremont Museum of Art The burgeoning punk rock music scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s in East Los Angeles provided an electrically charged, creative climate. This scene created an atmosphere where performance mixed with poetry, and visual culture was defined by an aesthetic and an attitude. Artists and musicians interfaced and blurred the lines of actions, documentation, photography, sound and style. Taking its name from the all-ages music club The Vex, once housed within East Los Angeles’ Self Help Graphics and Art, Vexing is an historical investigation of the women who were at the forefront of this movement of experimentation in music, art, culture and politics, while exploring their lasting legacies and contemporary practices. This documentary style exhibition will include photo, video and audio archives of the era as well as studio work encompassing painting, installation, writings and performance. Exchange and experimentation are central devices for considering the nature of practices generated during this historical period. This method of working has characterized a lasting modality for production where music plays a pivotal role in defining an image of self. Moreover, the content of this exhibition can be tied to a particularly exciting period of artistic and musical interchange in Los Angeles – with women staked out a unique position between and within punk rock, East LA, and the downtown art scene. Examining their practices historically not only specifies their contribution to the cultural landscape of LA, but provides a more concrete idea of the multiple social worlds and identities they negotiated. The groundwork laid by these women is a de-facto model for subsequent generations interested in alternative social movements as a platform for expression. Such platforms were explicit in the identity-politics constructs of the 1990s and are implicit in post-identity conceptual practices today. Participants include musicians Alice Bag, Teresa Covarrubias and Angela Vogel, musician and artist Exene Cervenka, artists Diane Gamboa and Patssi Valdez, photographers Dawn Wirth, Elsa Flores and Louis Jacinto, recording label-founder of Fatima Records Yolanda Comparan Ferrer, printmakers Richard Duardo, Jessee Vidaurre and John Miner, and filmmaker Jimmy Mendiola. Representing a newer generation of artistic producers influenced by these women are musician/artist Lysa Flores, artists Shizu Saldamando and Sandra de la Loza, photographer Chris TV, performance group Butchlalis de Panochtitlan, and the band The Sirens. Special concert footage and interviews courtesy of Pete Galindo, Willie Herón and Lysa Flores from the forthcoming documentary on The Vex. Research and reproduction support provided by the Chicano Studies Research Center at UCLA. This exhibition is co-curated by Pilar Tompkins and Colin Gunckel. A catalog will accompany the exhibition with essays by Josh Kun, Michelle Habell-Pallán, Colin Gunckel and Pilar Tompkins.