A new exhibition co-curated by CalArts faculty Michael Worthington opens this month at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, exploring the visual culture, politics, and community-building spirit of punk through the lens of Jewish artists, musicians, and creatives who helped shape the movement.
Outsiders, Outcasts, Rebels + Weirdos: Punk Culture 1976–86 opens Wednesday, May 20. The exhibition features more than 500 objects and pieces of ephemera, including handmade flyers, posters, zines, photographs, video, clothing, and artifacts connected to influential punk figures and bands including the Ramones, Blondie, Bad Religion, Suicide, the Patti Smith Group, and the Circle Jerks.
Worthington, who teaches in the Graphic Design Program at CalArts, helped shape the exhibition’s exploration of punk as both a cultural movement and a visual language. The exhibition also examines the often-overlooked relationship between Jewish musicians and the punk scene, particularly in New York, and considers how Jewish artists and fellow travelers contributed to a movement that challenged conventions around identity, power, and belonging.
“Punk was a way to reject normality, banality, conformity, and outdated mainstream points of view. It was a way to find your own voice and your own tribe,” Worthington said in the Skirball’s press release.
The exhibition arrives during the 50th anniversary year of punk’s emergence from New York’s downtown music scene. As punk spread internationally throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, it evolved into a broader cultural movement that influenced music, fashion, graphic design, and publishing.
In a recent Los Angeles Times feature about the exhibition, Worthington described punk as something deeply personal and formative, saying that for many participants, “it was a way to find your people.”
Outsiders, Outcasts, Rebels + Weirdos: Punk Culture 1976–86 is on view at the Skirball Cultural Center from May 20 through Sept. 6, 2026. More information is available on the Skirball website.
Also opening at the Skirball as part of its spring exhibitions is Inventing America: The Comic Book Revolution, which examines the evolution of comic books to today’s popular form of entertainment, and Robert Russell and Lisa Edelstein: A Palace in Time. The latter exhibition presents the two contemporary artists’ work side by side, creating an “intimate portrait of Jewish life through the ritual of the Sabbath.”
Russell (Art MFA 06) is a conceptual painter whose work often “treats ordinary objects—cups, books, figurines, candles—as vessels of personal history and ritual.”
