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The Do List

Hundreds of Raymond Pettibon’s Black Flag Show Fliers Go to Auction

Rae Alexandra
The artist's confrontational, often grotesque style defined the 1980s heyday of California punk.
A flier featuring black and white art of a woman sneaking into the room of a sleeping man. She is holding a gun.
A 1980 Raymond Pettibon flyer for Black Flag, The Enemy, The Cosmetics and Social Unrest at Mabuhay Gardens in San Francisco. (Courtesy of Specific Object/ Wright Auction House)

A new auction of Raymond Pettibon’s artwork is about to give punk rock fans a chance to own a piece of Bay Area music history.

Pettibon’s signature black and white sketches during the 1980s heyday of California punk were consistently confrontational and thought-provoking, and often lewd or grotesque. Pettibon’s striking images adorned fliers, posters, album covers, T-shirts, ads and a variety of other ephemera for bands like Black Flag, Flipper and Minutemen. Now, more than 300 of these items are about to go on sale via Wright Auction House in Chicago.

A flier featuring black and white drawings of crowds of men in underpants and tank tops.
A 1983 Raymond Pettibon flier advertising Black Flag, Saccharine Trust, NIGhist and Rebel Truth at the On Broadway in San Francisco. (Courtesy of Specific Object/ Wright Auction House)

Though phone and online bidding for Raymond Pettibon: The Punk Years officially opens on Aug. 22, advanced bids have already begun rolling in online. Starting bids across the board are $50, and estimated sale prices range between $150 and $1,500. One yellow “Jealous Again” skateboard, for example, is anticipated to garner as much as $1,000. Pettibon’s art zines are expected to fetch as much as $600 each, even though some of them are already available to read on the Internet Archive and buy online for less.

The bulk of the Bay Area-related items up for grabs are Pettibon’s Black Flag fliers for shows at Mabuhay Gardens and On Broadway, historic venues in San Francisco’s North Beach. Pettibon’s work for the band was prolific, in part because his brother Greg Ginn is Black Flag’s guitarist. Items promoting other bands are present here too — the likes of Descendents, Meat Puppets and Hüsker Dü playing lesser-known Bay Area clubs like Palo Alto’s Keystone, which closed in 1986.

A flier featuring black and white sketches of four people including John F Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald.
A 1979 flier for Black Flag and Dead Kennedys at the Mabuhay Gardens by Raymond Pettibon. (Courtesy of Specific Object/ Wright Auction House)

The auction was curated by Specific Object, a New York City gallery and bookstore owned by former MoMA curator David Platzker. There is something profoundly surreal about this particular moment in California underground music being presented and sold in this manner, but it’s also an opportunity to get your hands on Pettibon’s most searing work, presented in its original format. And that’s worth bidding on.

‘Raymond Pettibon: The Punk Years, Curated by Specific Object’ is open to online bids now through Aug. 22, 2024.

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