Oral history interview with Nan Goldin, 2017 April 30-May 13, Transcript
Oral history interview with Nan Goldin, 2017 April 30-May 13, Digital Sound Recording (Excerpt)
This transcript is open for research. For access to the audio recording, contact Reference Services.
An interview with Nan Goldin, conducted 2017 April 30 and May 13, by Alex Fialho, for the Archives of American Art's Visual Arts and the AIDS Epidemic: An Oral History Project, at Goldin's home in Brooklyn, New York.
Goldin speaks of her feminist outlook; her childhood in Silver Spring, Maryland; her older sister's suicide; attending boarding schools as an adolescent; early sexual experiences and encounters with queerness; her meaningful friendship with David Armstrong; her photography experiences; struggling with drug abuse; studying at the Boston Museum School in the early 1970s; developing the slide show as an exhibition medium; moving to New York in 1978; stories behind photographs in "I'll Be Your Mirror," "A Double Life," and "Ballad of Sexual Dependency;" early conversations about GRID and later HIV/AIDS; her admiration for David Armstrong and Peter Hujar's photography; losing friends and community to HIV/AIDS; organizing "Witnesses Against Our Vanishing;" photographing Cookie Mueller; the relationship between photography and memory; and the role of art in the AIDS crisis. Goldin also recalls David Armstrong, Mark Morrisroe, Greer Lankton, Elisabeth Sussman, Bruce Balboni, Max DiCocia, Kenny Angelico, Alf Bold, Gilles Dusein, William Coupon, Peter Hujar, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Jack Pierson, Jimmy Paul, Glenn O'Brien, Susan Wyatt, Kiki Smith, Jane Dixon, Janet Stein, Stephen Tashjian, Darrel Ellis, Allen Frame, Marvin Heiferman, Peter McGill, Sharon Niesp, Susan Sontag, Robert Wilson, and Annie Leibovitz.
Transcript is available on the Archives of American Art's website.
Interviewee Nan Goldin (1953- ) is a photographer in New York, New York. Interviewer Alex Fialho (1989- ) is a curator and arts writer and works as Programs Director for Visual AIDS in New York, New York.
This interview is part of the Archives of American Art Oral History Program, started in 1958 to document the history of the visual arts in the United States, primarily through interviews with artists, historians, dealers, critics and administrators.