With the first publication of her legendary zine, SCAM, and the formation of her band, Chickenhead, in 1991, Erica Dawn Lyle, then living in abandoned buildings in Miami, became an instrumental force in nationwide punk and DIY art subculture. The materials on offer from Lyle’s archive build on the initial collection of extremely Miami-specific papers purchased by University of Miami in 2010, showing the growth and development of Lyle’s work as it became known far and wide through the 1990s beyond the confines of her native South Florida. The collection’s materials chart Lyle’s artistic trajectory from fanzine writer to published author and contributor to This American Life and Artforum and from the stages of Churchill’s Hideaway in Little Haiti to headlining major music fests as guitar player of Bikini Kill – while also offering a look at how Lyle’s deep involvement in social movements like the anti-globalization movement of the late 1990s, and the fights against gentrification in the 1990s and 2000s and the anti-war movement of the early 2000s have informed her work.

The collected materials represent an unusually rich collection of cultural production and ephemera related to punk, queer, and activist subculture from the early 1990s through today that show Lyle to be squarely in the middle of the flow of the incredible flow of now-legendary DIY underground cultural production and social movements of the 1990s and 2000s like the Mission School of Bay Area artists and 1990s punk scene of the San Francisco Bay Area. The Lyle archive includes boxes and boxes of correspondence that show in real time documentation of these sub rosa scenes by those who created them while showing the way various key contributors to punk, activist, and queer scenes were connected to each other across time and space in a largely pre-social media era.

The posters and flyers that Lyle designed for events are a major feature, demonstrating the way that underground art production, punk music, and activism were fused by the DIY ethos of the artists and musicians in Lyle’s Milieu in the Bay Area and beyond. The collection shows how Lyle’s early interest in squatting and organizing projects like Miami’s first Food Not Bombs led to Lyles work in the Bay Area with groups like Punks Against War, Gay Shame, The Coalition on Homelessness, and Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition.

Lyle and her friends made and shared art and music not with an eye on commercial success but with the motivation of building community and fighting for social justice. More than paper and ephemera, the archive also includes one of a kind objects like locks cut to open squats, stolen Fed Ex numbers, and love letters made of torn up American flags that together help form a much clearer picture of the humor, politics, and close to the bone living condition of Lyle and her friends. These objects draw out the depth of the archive, lending themselves to possible presentation in an exhibition.

Primary areas of activity: San Francisco, New York City
Dates: 1990 – 2023
Item count: 5,000
Enclosures: 37 banker boxes, one large flat
Material: artists’ books, publications and zines, audio and video media, books, correspondence, ephemera, manuscripts, original art, photography, posters, prints, notebooks, sketchbooks, tear-sheets
Culture: artworld, anarcho-hipster, LBGTQIA+, punk, post-punk, Riot Grrrl, anti-war, gender, and social justice activism

Please contact [email protected] for more information.