View XML QR Code

San Francisco Punk Flyers collection, 1977-1998

Overview of the Collection

Title
San Francisco Punk Flyers collection
Dates
1977-1998 (inclusive)
Quantity
6 boxes, (3.75 linear feet)
Collection Number
UUS_COLL MSS 523
Summary
This collection is largely composed of flyers and posters advertising punk concerts and performances in the San Francisco area.
Repository
Utah State University, Merrill-Cazier Library, Special Collections and Archives Division
Special Collections & Archives
Merrill-Cazier Library
Utah State University
Logan, UT
84322-3000
Telephone: 4357978248
Fax: 4357972880
scweb@usu.edu
Access Restrictions

No restrictions on use, except: not available through interlibrary loan.

Languages
English
Return to Top

Biographical Note

The Punk movement’s culture, music, and art embody the raw expression of alienated youth and social disintegration with reckless energy. Combining the vitality of graffiti with creative spontaneity and appropriation, the art of punk flyers and ephemera exhibits a blatantly aggressive response to the psychedelic posters of the proceeding era. Born out of the chaotic economic decline of the working class in the late sixties and early seventies, the Punk aesthetic is the inevitable heir to 1950s and 60s Beat culture with its angry rejection of the status-quo and the rampant production of self-published broadsides and little magazines.

In a pre-internet, pre-Twitter world, punk flyers were speedy cut and paste productions, or hand drawn images and text. Often produced the day of an event, these flyers exemplify a low-tech, hands-on approach to design that has massively influenced today’s graphic art. Xerox-printed and stapled to poles or pasted up around town the flyers are rare and perfect ephemera: politicized, local, cheap, immediate, and made to throw away. They are an important visual records and cultural artifacts of an international youth movement.

The majority of the punk concert flyers in this collection document performances at Mabuhay Gardens, a San Francisco nightclub which started featuring rock shows around 1976. Ness Aquino, the owner of the club, collaborated with a rock promoter and television producer Dirk Dirksen in order to make Mabuhay Gardens a prominent venue for punk rock shows. Upstairs of Mabuhay was The On Broadway Theater which also served as a venue for shows.

Return to Top

Content Description

This collection is composed of largely of flyers and posters advertising punk concerts and performances in the San Francisco area. The flyers are about 8.5 x 11 inches or smaller and printed on regular weight paper; punk posters are generally similar but can measure up to 11 x 17 inches. These items were scanned for a digital exhibit and are organized numerically in the order which they were scanned.

Return to Top

Use of the Collection

Restrictions on Use

It is the responsibility of the researcher to obtain any necessary copyright clearances.

Permission to publish material from the San Francisco Punk Flyers collection must be obtained from the Special Collections Manuscript Curator and/or the Special Collections Department Head.

Preferred Citation

Initial Citation: San Francisco Punk Flyers collection, USU_COLL MSS 523, Box [ ]. Special Collections and Archives. Utah State University Merrill-Cazier Library. Logan, Utah.

Following Citations:USU_COLL MSS 523, USUSCA.

Return to Top

Administrative Information

Arrangement

These items were scanned for a digital exhibit and are organized numerically in the order which they were scanned.

Processing Note

Processed in August of 2015

Acquisition Information

This collection was purchased by USU Special Collections & Archives from Divison Leap Bookstore in 2014.

Bibliography

Return to Top

Detailed Description of the Collection

Finding aid/Register created by Joanna Dobrowolska, Cody Patton, and Clint Pumphrey
2016

CC Attribution
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

About Creative Commons Licenses in Archives West