CLAREMONT, CA.-The Claremont Museum of Art is pleased to present Vexing: Female Voices from East LA Punk from May 18 to August 31, 2008. The Museum will host an opening reception on Saturday, May 17th, with live performances by several artists in the exhibition.

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.

In an artistic environment fueled by exchange and experimentation, music played a pivotal role in defining new images of self. This exhibition documents a vital moment of artistic and musical interchange in Los Angeles, with women staking out a position between and within punk rock, East LA and the downtown art scene. Vexing not only considers their significant contributions to the cultural landscape of LA, but also examines the multiple scenes and identities they negotiated. These women have also served as a model for subsequent generations interested in alternative social movements as a platform of expression, as well as the post-identity conceptual practices of today.

Participants include musicians Alice Bag, Teresa Covarrubias, Angela Vogel, Monica Flores, 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 Her�n 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-Pall�n, Colin Gunckel and Pilar Tompkins.

Accompanying Vexing - The Reconsidered Archive of Michelle du Bois - Utilizing an inherited photographic collection that includes an assemblage of personalities and alter egos of a single American woman traveling through the Pacific Rim in the 1970s and 1980s, Los Angeles-based artist Zoe Crosher manipulates archived materials to string various narratives from within another woman’s complex process of auto-documentation. Through the artist’s eye, a distinct portrait of a woman emerges, one that is tied to the women’s and sexual liberation movements of the era, while revealing the vulnerability that accompanies the trappings of her lifestyle. In Crosher’s groupings of small photographs, Du Boise is both heroine and ing�nue toying with persona, identity, fetishism and exoticism.

Blah, Blah, Blah Revolution - Frequently employing play on words, Los Angeles-based artist Maya Schindler’s practice ranges from the fanciful to the political. The artist’s witty, text-based sculptures and wall pieces beckon the viewer to activate the works by enunciating the phrase presented. Blah, Blah, Blah Revolution is an outdoor sculptural piece that utilizes scale and material to further the irony of a juxtaposition of apathy and activism.

About the Curators - Pilar Tompkins is contemporary curator of the Claremont Museum of Art. Additionally, she is director of the Latin American branch of the Artist Pension Trust, APT: Mexico City, a program providing long-term financial planning and international curatorial opportunities to artists around the world. Recent projects include L'Ottava Tavola: An Etymology of Contemporary Codes in Cortona, Italy and Latitude: Patterns for Orchestrating Domain in Los Angeles. In 2006 she was a founding director and curator of the MexiCali Biennial, a bi-national art exhibition and music event transcending the socio-political and physical constraints of the US/Mexico border. Tompkins has held positions as director of leading contemporary galleries The Project, MC and Anna Helwing Gallery.

Colin Gunckel is a Ph.D candidate in Cinema and Media Studies at UCLA, and is currently completing his dissertation on the exhibition and reception of Mexican cinema in Los Angeles. He has published essays in the Duke University Press anthology Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style and Politics and in the journal Velvet Light Trap. Colin also works in Arts Projects at the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, as a developmental editor for both the A Ver: Revisioning Art History and The Chicano Archives series. In addition, he is the programming director for the Latin American Cinemateca of Los Angeles.