McKenna (Kristine) papers, 1910-2018, bulk 1955-2010

Summary

Title:

Kristine McKenna papers

Dates:

1910-2018, bulk 1955-2010

Creators:

McKenna, Kristine

Extent:

37.63 Linear Feet 43 boxes

Language:

English

Preferred citation:

[Box/folder no. or item name], Kristine McKenna papers, Collection no. 6288, Special Collections, USC Libraries, University of Southern California

Background

Scope and content:

The Kristine McKenna papers document McKenna's career as a journalist, critic, art curator, and author with a focus on art, music, film, and countercultural movements. The collection materials cover McKenna's work writing for the Los Angeles Times from 1977 through 1998, as well as her work for other publications, book projects, and curatorial endeavors. Specific projects documented in the collection include The Cool School (2008) documentary and The Ferus Gallery: A Place to Begin (2009) monograph, which chronicle the birth of the contemporary art community in Los Angeles; research and photographs for Semina Culture, an exhibition on Wallace Berman and his circle; and various collaborations with figures like Walter Hopps, Charles Brittin, David Lynch, Captain Beefheart, and Richard Prince. The collection holds photographs, recorded interviews, correspondence, exhibition catalogs, and ephemera tied to McKenna's subjects of interest, including the early Los Angeles punk rock scene, avant‐garde art, and experimental filmmakers. Lastly, the papers include correspondence and materials that McKenna acquired from individuals she wrote about, interviewed, or otherwise encountered through her work.

Biographical / historical:

The following biographical information was copied from Kristine McKenna's Wikipedia article on April 2, 2025.

Kristine McKenna is an American journalist, critic, and art curator best known for her interviews with artists, writers, thinkers, filmmakers, and musicians. Many of these have been collected in Book of Changes (2001) and Talk to Her (2004). Among the people she has interviewed and written about most often over the years are Exene Cervenka, Leonard Cohen, David Lynch, Captain Beefheart, Brian Eno, and Dan Hicks.

McKenna wrote for the Los Angeles Times from 1977 through 1998 and was one of the first mainstream journalists chronicling the early L.A. punk rock scene. She was Music Editor for influential avant-garde arts publication Wet and West Coast Editor of NME. Her profiles and criticism have appeared in Artforum, The New York Times, ARTnews, Vanity Fair, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, and many other publications. She was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Administration grant (1976) and a Critics Fellowship from the National Gallery of Art (1991). She has contributed to many programs by radio artist Joe Frank.

McKenna co-curated the 1998 exhibition Forming: the Early Days of L.A. Punk, for Track 16 Gallery in Santa Monica. She was co-curator of Semina Culture: Wallace Berman & his Circle, a traveling group exhibition that opened at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in 2005. She is producer and co-writer of The Cool School, a documentary about L.A.'s first avant-garde gallery, and her book, The Ferus Gallery: A Place to Begin, was published by Steidl in 2009.

Her 2007 monograph on the photography of Wallace Berman, Wallace Berman Photographs, co-written with Lorraine Wild, was selected as one of the 50 best art books of the year by the AIGA. In 2009, she curated She: Work by Wallace Berman & Richard Prince, for the Michael Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles. In 2010 McKenna curated The Beautiful and the Damned, a show of photographs of L.A.'s early punk scene by Ann Summa. Her 2011 survey exhibition of photographer Charles Brittin was accompanied by the artist's monograph, Charles Brittin: West & South.

In 2010 she partnered with Donna Wingate and Lorraine Wild to launch the publishing imprint Foggy Notion Books.

In October 2015 it was announced that she was co-writing filmmaker David Lynch's "quasi-memoir" titled Life & Work. The book, retitled Room to Dream, was published in June 2018. She has participated in Lynch's "Festival of Disruption," doing onstage interviews with Lynch, Frank Gehry, Ed Ruscha, Sheryl Lee, and others.

Musician Dan Hicks spent hours on the phone with McKenna every Friday for several years before his death in 2016, telling her his life story. She edited the conversations into Hicks' posthumous autobiography, I Scare Myself, published in 2017.

Acquisition information:

Purchased from Kristine McKenna, October 18, 2024.

Processing information:

The intellectual arrangement of series and descriptive records in this finding aid is based on Kristine McKenna's original organization of the collection prior to its acquisition by the USC Libraries. Along with the donation of the collection, McKenna provided an inventory containing detailed descriptions of most of the collection's contents. The accessioning archivist retained and adapted many of McKenna's original descriptions for use in this finding aid. Many of the series-, box-, and folder-level records include notes titled "Notes by Kristine McKenna," which quote McKenna's inventory. McKenna's original inventory was structured by box, reflecting the collection's previous physical arrangement. Although the materials were rehoused during the USC Libraries' accessioning, the original box-based descriptive structure was preserved in the series-level organization of the finding aid--even when materials from a single series were relocated to different boxes. To account for these changes, some quoted notes were edited to replace references to "this box" with "this series."

McKenna's inventory (and this finding aid's description) does not describe every item in the collection. McKenna's descriptions of parts of the collection comprise incomplete lists of items that McKenna considered most significant. Contact Special Collections for access to McKenna's original inventory.

The digital images and other digital assets stored on CDs have not been copied to the USC Libraries' digital asset management systems. The collection's analog audio and video recordings have not been digitized by the USC Libraries.

Rules or conventions:

Describing Archives: A Content Standard

Related resources

Separated material:

Some of the published materials acquired as part of the Kristine McKenna papers were separated from the archival collection and cataloged individually. The cataloged items are discoverable via the USC Libraries catalog search. The catalog records describing the separated materials include a local note: "Acquired by the USC Libraries as part of the Kristine McKenna papers."

Indexed terms

Subjects:

Alternative rock music -- California -- Archival resources
Art, American -- California -- Los Angeles -- Archival resources
Art criticism -- California -- Los Angeles -- Archival resources
Art museum curators -- California -- Los Angeles -- Archival resources
Artists -- California -- Los Angeles -- 20th century -- Archival resources
Artists -- Interviews -- Archival resources
Artists -- United States -- Archival resources
Critics -- California -- Los Angeles -- Archival resources
Exhibitions -- California -- Los Angeles -- Archival resources
Journalists -- California -- Archival resources
Motion picture producers and directors -- California -- Los Angeles -- Archival resources
Punk culture and art -- California -- Archival resources
Punk rock music -- California -- Archival resources
Correspondence
Ephemera
Exhibition catalogs
Interviews (Sound recordings)
Photographs
Reviews (documents)
Serials (publications)
Video recordings (physical artifacts)

Names:

Ferus Gallery (Los Angeles, Calif.) -- Archives
Beefheart, Captain (1941-01-15-2010-12-17) -- Archives
Berman, Wallace, 1926-1976 -- Archives
Brittin, Charles, 1928- -- Archives
Cervenka, Exene (19560201) -- Archives
Cohen, Leonard (Leonard Norman), 1934-2016 -- Archives
Duncan, Michael, 1953- -- Archives
Eno, Brian (Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle), 1948- -- Archives
Hicks, Dan, 1941-2016 -- Archives
Hopps, Walter (1932-05-03-2005-03-20) -- Archives
Kelley, Mike, 1954-2012 -- Archives
Lynch, David, 1946-2025 -- Archives
McKenna, Kristine -- Archives
Prince, Richard, 1949- -- Archives
Van Vliet, Don, 1941-2010 -- Archives

About this collection guide

Collection Guide Author:

Bo Doub -- with much of the series-, box-, and item-level description adapted from Kristine McKenna's original inventory

Date Encoded:

This finding aid was produced using ArchivesSpace on 2025-05-19 15:57:12 -0700 .

Restrictions:

Collection stored off-site. Advance notice required for access.

Terms of access:

All requests for permission to publish or quote from manuscripts must be submitted in writing to the Department of Special Collections at specol@usc.edu. Permission for publication is given on behalf of Special Collections as the owner of the physical items and is not intended to include or imply permission of the copyright holder, which must also be obtained.

At the time of USC Libraries' acquisition of the collection, Kristine McKenna held the copyright to all materials contained in the collection and transferred these copyrights to USC, with the following exceptions:

1. Works produced for Rolling Stone Magazine and Playboy Magazine;
2. Photographs taken by Charles Brittin, where the Getty Research Institute holds the copyright to Charles Brittin's work;
3. Photographs taken by Wallace Berman, with the Wallace Berman Estate holding the copyright to Wallace Berman's work, represented by Michael Kohn Gallery.

Finding aid description and metadata are licensed under an Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license.

Preferred citation:

[Box/folder no. or item name], Kristine McKenna papers, Collection no. 6288, Special Collections, USC Libraries, University of Southern California

Location of this collection:

University of Southern California, Special Collections

Special Collections

Doheny Memorial Library, Room 209

Los Angeles, CA 90089-0189, US

Contact:

(213) 740-5900

specol@usc.edu

Website