Exene Cervenka

Born in Chicago in 1956, musician/visual artist Exene Cervenka grew up in Illinois and Florida. She relocated to Los Angeles in 1976, and the following year she and fellow musician, John Doe, formed the legendary punk rock band X. Side projects include The Knitters and Auntie Christ. She continues to tour with X, and a solo album is scheduled for release this fall on the Bloodshot label. She left L.A. for Missouri in 2007.

The “compulsively creative” Exene began making art in the late 1970s, creating elaborate journals that combined poetry fragments, mementos, and discarded objects she collected as she toured with X during a period of three decades. She also began to create collages, mounting found objects and ephemera to either canvas board or cardboard, and often applying paint.

For Exene, a self-taught artist, making art is both therapeutic and meditative. Inspired by everything she sees in the world around her, she works intuitively and has referred to the artistic process as “organizing the outskirts of [her] brain.”

A group of her journals and collages were shown at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in 2005, and she is included in the current exhibition, “Celestial Ash: Assemblages from Los Angeles,” at the Craft and Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles (through September 13, 2009).