Museum Monday: Museums Are the Next Punk Rock

Museums Are the Next Punk Rock  

Museums are about to explode with the same DIY energy that punk labels unleashed in the late ’70s. Back then, a few fearless pioneers proved that anyone could start a record label—and so, everyone did. Now it’s museums’ turn.

Tequila Mockingbird—punk-jazz singer, actress, writer, curator, and cultural historian—has been a driving force in the Los Angeles punk scene since the late ’70s. In 2011, she founded the Punk Museum, a pop-up dedicated to showcasing punk art, music, and memorabilia. It was a promise kept to her friend Darby Crash of the Germs: to “keep punk alive.” Fittingly, the opening night was shut down by police. Total street cred.

I had the privilege of visiting and presenting there in its early days. That experience—along with a trip to the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa—planted the first seeds of my own museum, the Museum of Post Punk and Industrial Music, which opened in April 2021.

Other museums have followed a similar grassroots path. The Ramones Museum in Berlin began in a basement in 2005 and has since evolved into a bar, gallery, restaurant, and event space—perhaps a blueprint for Fat Mike’s Punk Rock Museumin Las Vegas, which his investment group launched in April 2023.

Get ready: Henry Rollins just announced he’s invested his life savings into a Nashville building that will house his personal collection. A formal announcement is coming soon. Somewhere in my archives, I still have a 1987 agreement with Henry for a $60 spoken word show at the Court Tavern in New Brunswick, NJ. His rider? A pitcher of water.

Elsewhere, the archives of Maximum Rocknroll and artifacts from Lydia Lunch are now housed at Middle Tennessee State University’s Center for Popular Music. In March, Mick Jones presented his Rock & Roll Public Library at the Farsight Gallery in London. Over in Frankfurt, the Museum of Modern Electronic Music opened in April 2022, dedicated to the evolution of electronic sound.

Here in Chicago, we’re still finding out what our museum is—and more importantly, what the experience feels like. We let it emerge organically. Our visitors are teaching us what it needs to be. No two days are the same: yesterday was all PiL, the day before leaned fashion-forward. Some days it’s “Chicago everything,” others it’s just Trent Trent Trent. I’m so glad we didn’t lock ourselves into a concept before it had a chance to breathe. I actually love that.

Cynthia Plaster Caster’s area keeps expanding. (happy birthday yesterday Cynthia) Some have shrunk. We just learned the word “heuristic”—turns out, we’ve been living it.

As it should be, this museum has taught me so much about things I didn’t even know I didn’t know.

So come visit—our museum, or any museum that’s finding its own weird, raw truth.

Museums are the next punk rock.