Nan Goldin

Goldin unflinchingly documents the struggles and courage that defined her community’s response to the devastating AIDS epidemic. In 1989, she organized Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing at New York’s Artists Space, the first exhibition featuring the work of artists who were living with or had died from AIDS, or whose art responded to the disease, including David Armstrong, Peter Hujar, Greer Lankton, and David Wojnarowicz.

In recent years, Goldin has focused on natural light, the sky, and landscape in works that explore spirituality and mortality. Her portraits feature photographs of individuals and couples, children, and families taken over extended periods; other series picture empty rooms with palpable traces of human presence. Presented as projected images, large-scale grids of multiple prints, single prints, and books, Goldin’s photographs operate in narrative sequence with thematic relationships to one another.

I’ll Be Your Mirror, a mid-career retrospective of Goldin’s work, was organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 1996, and traveled throughout Europe. Collaborating with Edmund Coulthard, Goldin made the documentary film I’ll Be Your Mirror in 1996, offering an autobiographical exploration of her work and interviews with her close friends and subjects. The retrospective Le Feu Follet followed in 2001, opening at Centre Pompidou, Paris, and traveling extensively.

In 2010, the Musée du Louvre, Paris, commissioned Scopophilia, giving Goldin access to take pictures of its collection, which she paired with photographs from throughout her career to explore the fluidity of gender and constancy of desire. A major recent slideshow, Memory Lost (2019–21), scored by composer Mica Levi, with additional music by CJ Calderwood and Soundwalk Collective, relates a haunting and emotional narrative comprised of outtakes drawn from her archive of thousands of slides.

In 2017, Goldin founded P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) in response to the overdose crisis. The group stages direct public actions to hold Big Pharma accountable and expose the complicity of institutions that accept such funding. These protests have led to the removal of the Sackler name from the British Museum, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Musée du Louvre, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Serpentine Galleries, Tate, and other museums and universities. P.A.I.N. promotes life-saving treatments for people using drugs and advocates for a public policy of harm reduction.

This Will Not End Well, a retrospective focused on Goldin’s slideshows and video installations, was organized by the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, in 2022 and will travel to the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, before coming to the United States. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022), a film directed by Laura Poitras on which Goldin collaborated, interweaves narratives of the artist’s life, work, and activism. It was awarded the Golden Lion at the 79th Venice International Film Festival and Best Documentary at the 38th Independent Spirit Awards and won film critics association awards for best documentary in New York, London, Los Angeles, and Toronto. The film was nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the BAFTA Film Awards and the 95th Academy Awards.