Public Art: VEXING - Female Voices from East L.A. Punk

For those of us on the east coast, we may know about Boricuas and salsa legends from Tito Puente and Celia Cruz to Willie Colon and Hector Lavoe.  Or we may even know that a large portion of east coast Mexican immigrants come from Puebla, Mexico and Cubans hold it down in Miami.  But, one thing is for sure, most of us don’t know a damn thing about the Chicano Movement of the west coast, and its cultural hub in East Los Angeles.  Enter, Self Help Graphics and Art, a legendary community arts organization in the heart of East Los that has nurtured, cultivated and provided a platform for a myriad of Chicano and Mexican artists across generations.  Self Help Graphics and Art and THE VEX club, formally housed on its premises, offers a point of departure for The Claremont Museum’s upcoming exhibition, VEXING: Female Voice and East L.A. Punk, that explores the East L.A. scene in the late 70’s and early 80’s, and its subsequent influence on a younger generation of artists.

(Images left to right: Shizu Saldamando, Cindi and Asma in the Ladies Room, 2007, Colored pencil, collage on paper Collection of Sam Lee and Karen Rapp.  Dawn Wirth, Alice Bag, Jensen Rec Center/Silver Lake Film Festival, 2007, Silver-halide/C print. Courtesy of the artist)

The exhibition was designed to document, “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: Female Voices from East LA Punk is on view from May 18 to August 31, 2008 at The Claremont Museum of Art in Claremont, California.  Stay tuned for a forthcoming catalog on the exhibition and a documentary on The Vex by Pete Galindo, Willie Herón and Lysa Flores.