There is a corner of MacArthur Park where fifty years of Los Angeles punk currently hangs on the walls, and some of it is ours. Walk into the Goethe-Institut’s project space this fall, where Tequila Mockingbird’s Punk Museum is on view through October 7, and our contribution is the corner that goes vertical: garments mounted as high as the ladder would reach, black cloth streaked and splattered with white, a red shroud of torn crochet presiding at the top where the wall runs out. We were asked for a display. What we built is closer to an altar.
The invitation came through Tequila Mockingbird, whose Punk Museum sits at the heart of the Institut’s Alle gegen Alles. Punk@50 programming: an exhibition assembled not from acquisitions but from a life spent inside the scene, tracing Los Angeles punk alongside its German and European counterparts. There is something fitting about a German cultural institute hosting this. Punk was never a local dialect; it was a correspondence, carried on across oceans by records, zines, and badly photocopied flyers, and fifty years on the Goethe-Institut has chosen to answer the mail.
The brief was Edward’s clothing, five decades of it. Rather than dress a row of mannequins, we treated our section as an installation: the work climbs the wall in a single accumulating figure, with veiled and hooded forms gathered at its base, one in a beaded lace mantilla, one hung with crosses and straps. The photographs sit at the foot of it all, framed and leaned the way offerings collect at the base of a shrine, and the topmost garment fans out across the corner, claiming as much wall as the building would concede. The reference we kept returning to was Saint Brigid, who asked the King of Leinster for only as much land as her cloak would cover, then spread that cloak across the Curragh of Kildare. Edward left Dublin as a boy. The saints travel with you whether you ask them to or not.
And every altar wants a relic. Ours is not a metaphor: one of the hanging suits is encrusted with fifty years of spit, accumulated a stage at a time since the era when gobbing was how an audience said thank you. We spent the opening night telling visitors this, and watched each of them lean in for a closer look, then quietly reconsider the distance.
The pieces span the design room at Poseurs on Sunset, the surrealist work sold through Neo 80 and Tiger Rose, the proto-goth years at Black Salad, and the stage wear of the current lineup. The thesis, in Edward’s words, is that punk gave a generation a shared language of dress, and languages invite dialects. This corner is one designer’s dialect, spoken continuously for fifty years, from the era when Nervous Gender was confrontation in a club to the present, where Nervous Gender Reloaded carries the argument forward with no constraints left on it.
Alongside the installation we produced a booklet gathering the photographs and the story behind them, with images by Wild Don Lewis, Edward Colver, Karin Lindberg-Freda, @venom_verbatim, Bumbdog Torres, Doug Moore, Sydney Rose, and others whose names the decades have misplaced. The topmost image on the cover is Wild Don Lewis’s. The booklets sit on a collection plate at the foot of the display, free for anyone to take. This may be the only altar in Los Angeles where the plate pays you.
The opening filled the gallery to its walls, and it deserved an afterparty. We played Deep House Design/RetailSlut alongside Atomic Kangaroo, and if the name rings a bell, it should: Retail Slut dressed the Melrose underground for over twenty years, which made it the correct place to take a fashion exhibit off its mannequins and put it back on bodies. The installation shows what the clothes look like standing still. The afterparty was a reminder of what they are for.
Tequila Mockingbird’s Punk Museum is on view at the Goethe-Institut Los Angeles Project Space in MacArthur Park through October 7, 2026, free during office hours. Fifty years of this and nobody has managed to make us presentable.