Undoubtedly the greatest and largest collection of Punk, Modern Primitive, and Industrial culture ever assembled. V. Vale’s professional and personal archive is almost overwhelming in its diversity and richness. Photos and posters that have never before been seen by the public, are complemented with postcards, letters, cartoons, and other rare ephemera. V. Vale, the visionary publisher of both the seminal Punk newspaper Search & Destroy and then the acclaimed Punk and Post-Punk RE/Search Publications was not only the primary documentarian of Punk culture, via RE/Search he also compiled and published a lifelong collection of materials and books relating to all the other major pre- and Post-Punk sub-cultures that both informed or were, in part, catalyzed by the Punk movement. The collection has complete runs of all the Search & Destroy and RE/Search publications as well as almost all of the related original source and background research material, original artwork and photography, audio interviews, transcripts, manuscripts, and production material.

Throughout the decades V. Vale has become not only a creator but an incandescent magnet for global Punk and alternative culture, the list of notables is endless, but it is the legion of unknown Punks, iconoclasts, and cultural pioneers that have shipped and delivered thousands of cultural artifacts to Vale in San Francisco thus assisting him in assembling this astounding collection.

This archive is, in of itself, irrefutable evidence of Punk’s indelible and positive influence on all aspects of the 20th and 21st centuries’ global culture, and sheds particular light on Punk’s deconstruction of conventional gender and body image (and physicality) as well as numerous other conventional social constructions. Instructing multiple generations in the alternative arts Vale’s personal and professional collecting and curatorial expertise has resulted in a truly exceptional archive, a veritable Punk and post-Punk arcade of strikingly diverse and provocative human social endeavors, an encyclopedic edifice of exuberance and ingenuity that completely explodes the oppressive limitations of behavioral normality and has freed 100,000’s from the tedium and close-mindedness of corporate consumer culture.

Dates: 1960’s – 2014
Bulk Dates: 1978 – 2001
Estimated Object Count: 100,000
Total Box Count: 250 various sized boxes