Announcements

Washington, D.C. has long been a hotbed of musical excellence-Duke Ellington, Marvin Gaye, Chuck Brown, John Philip Sousa, Elizabeth Cotten, Gil Scott-Heron, Roberta Flack, and countless others have called the city home. When the punk rock community emerged in the mid-1970s, it was the latest addition to the District's extraordinary creative mosaic. Widely respected for decades of musical innovation, D.C.'s punk scene also has a meaningful tradition of political activism and do-it-yourself (DIY) creativity that manifested through concerts, protests, records, fliers, fanzines, and much more.

Special Collections in Performing Arts (SCPA) at the University of Maryland presents a new digital exhibit exploring the first 15 years of the punk subculture in Washington, D.C. Persistent Vision: The D.C. Punk Collections at the University of Maryland displays more than 1,000 digitized fliers, photographs, zines, and recordings from SCPA's collections of D.C. punk archival material. The exhibit can be viewed at https://exhibitions.lib.umd.edu/dc-punk.

Persistent Vision is co-curated by SCPA curator John Davis (a longtime participant in D.C. punk through bands like Q And Not U and Title Tracks) and musicologist and SCPA manager Ben Jackson. The exhibit presents rarely-seen artifacts from the subculture in a narrative format, using essays and discographies to illustrate details of each year in the community, as framed within the broader context of historical happenings in both D.C. and the United States from the late 1970s through the early 1990s.

The exhibit illustrates the rise and explosion in popularity of influential D.C. punk bands like Bad Brains, Minor Threat, Rites of Spring, Fugazi, Bikini Kill, and many others. Just as critically, the exhibit spotlights the lesser-known musicians, fanzine creators, record label owners, and other scene participants who were the often-overlooked backbone of the community. A living exhibit, Persistent Vision will continue to expand in the months ahead with more years added to tell the scene's story into the 21st century.