Keeping the momentum of “Live in Las Vegas,” this week we bring you Nuit Hansgen of the Punk Rock Museum and Punk Foundation. What does it mean to curate a “punk rock” museum and organize a “punk” non-profit that strives to preserve, promote, educate, and advance punk in its genealogical ties to historical social justice movements? As we punk scholars know, it takes a lot of passion, dedication, and perseverance despite the oft-heard challenges “that’s not punk” (referring to the scholarly, archival, and otherwise “institutionalizing” of punk). In this episode, Jessica Schwartz and Russ Bestley go “behind the scenes” or “displays,” as it were, and engage Nuit in questions concerning the high/low culture binary, mass produced material & punk ephemera, generational divides concerning cultural values and definitions, and the nuts, bolts, politics, and logistics of amplifying punk in the broader network of punk collections and cultural foundations. 

Nuit Hansgen is an arts-world veteran whose work merges cultural heritage, technology, media, and social change in her roles as a curator, producer, and educator. During her nearly 20 years at the Kennedy Center, she led collaborations with established and emerging artists, musicians, and activists, while her work in arts and cultural heritage encompasses storytelling and story-gathering in multiple media. In 2017, Nuit founded the Cultural Archive Initiative, a nonprofit, DIY effort to locate, aggregate, preserve, and share the collective memory and material culture of the American underground. The prototyping initiative, the Punk Archive, is a DIY effort to locate, aggregate, preserve, and document American punk's cultural archives and narratives, fusing crowdsourcing, collective memory, and emerging tech to steward and share its complex, complicated history.

Nuit also works closely with The Punk Rock Museum in Las Vegas and is working with a team to develop a nonprofit body, The Punk Foundation, to document and preserve the global cultural history of punk for future generations.