Loving America, punk style

If you’re familiar with Exene Cervenka, it’s most likely as singer of the legendary L.A. punk act X. Her work as a collage artist, journal keeper and aficionado of cast-off Americana is far less known. But this side of Cervenka recently went on display at the Santa Monica Museum of Art.

The first public show of Cervenka’s artwork, “America the Beautiful” is a collection of collages she’s assembled since the late ‘90s and journals she’s written from when she was 17, using objects she found in L.A. and across the country.

“Mostly it’s just finding things that were distinctively local, which you don’t find very much anymore,” Cervenka, 49, explained as she flipped through a journal assembled during the group’s tour for the 1981 album “Wild Gift.” She stopped at a page with a glued-in Idaho Spud candy bar wrapper.

“That’s what the ‘America the Beautiful’ title goes with. You know, just the things you would find in the street.”

Displayed in the museum’s Project Room as a complement to the exhibition “Semina Culture: Wallace Berman & His Circle” in the main gallery, the 11 journals are not only an affectionate tribute to the U.S. but also a detailed trip back to Cervenka’s early ‘80s heyday. There’s a Smurf sticker and rubber-stamp image of Mr. T, lyrics in elaborate calligraphic text and in individually stickered-on letters, crisp fall leaves and lost jewelry, notes from fans and decades-old pictures of herself with and without her band.

The 13 collages incorporate items such as unused drink tickets and vintage jukebox labels, typewriter keys and advertisements, broken linoleum and a used Palm Springs shopping bag.

Juxtaposed into cryptic, often humorous stories, the objects Cervenka selected are telling. Her taste is, to be sure, broad and roaming, but she seems to gravitate toward the ‘50s, when Cervenka was born, and the early ‘80s, when X helped define the L.A. punk movement with its guitar-driven, rockabilly-infused, poetic harmonies.

Cervenka’s collage sensibility mirrors the beauty and humor she brought to X. Like punk, which was birthed by non-musicians deciding to make music anyway, Cervenka’s work is folk art in the truest sense -- unexpected, unschooled and resourcefully pieced together from cast-away cultural ephemera in the name of love, not money.

“I’m very American. I love our culture. I love the pieces, the most mundane stuff about our culture, and I think you can make the best art out of an ordinary item that is usually thrown away or people don’t care about,” said Cervenka, a dedicated thrift store-ista.

IF it weren’t for curator Kristine McKenna, Cervenka’s work would probably have remained where she stores it: in her bedroom.

An arts reporter who covered the L.A. punk scene, McKenna was the first journalist to interview Cervenka in the ‘70s, shortly after Cervenka had moved to L.A. from Florida and formed X with John Doe, whom she’d met in a poetry class.

In the last six years, McKenna interviewed her two more times to help write the liner notes for a series of X album reissues. She was struck by a couple of Cervenka’s collages on the wall. McKenna, at the time, was also in the midst of co-curating “Semina Culture,” the show running concurrently with “America the Beautiful.”

“It just seemed like the right match,” McKenna said. “A lot of the artists [in the Berman show] were collage artists and made things from found objects.”

Focused around Semina, the hand-printed, free-form, art-and-poetry journal Berman began publishing in 1955, and its contributors, the “Semina Culture” show is, in a way, a punk precursor. It’s an in-depth exploration of beatnik counterculture in the conformist Eisenhower era.

Photographer Charles Brittin, author Henry Miller, poet Allen Ginsberg and performance artist Rachel Rosenthal are among the 48 artists and Berman collaborators represented in works of various media displayed along with Berman’s photographs and collages.

“This is right like Exene’s work,” said McKenna, referring to a door-sized collage hanging in the Berman show. “All these people made art about each other and for each other. They didn’t sell it. They gave it to each other. That’s what I find so beautiful about this community. It wasn’t about career or money.”

The same can be said of Cervenka’s work in “America the Beautiful.”

“Some of [the journals] are just scribbling. They’re not supposed to be art,” she said. “I was just keeping myself amused.”

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‘America the Beautiful’

Where: Santa Monica Museum of Art, Bergamot Station G1, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica

When: 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays

Ends: Nov. 26

Price: Free

Info: (310) 586-6488; www.smmoa.org