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The Arts Intel Report

A Cultural Compass
For the World Traveler
A Cultural Compass
For the World Traveler

Nan Goldin: 1972–1977

Sept 11 – Oct 9, 2021
1062 N Orange Grove Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90046, United States

At the end of the 1960s, when Nan Goldin was 14, she ran away from home with a camera. Around 1972, Goldin moved into a house in Boston, where she lived with a group of drag queens and started snapping pictures of them at home and out partying—intimate, candid photos of people kissing, undressing, drugging, drinking, and sleeping in after a night of too much. Showing 15 rarely displayed photographs taken between 1972 and 1977, Matthew Marks highlights Goldin’s early work. Many of the photos were taken during her time at Boston’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts, right before Goldin moved to New York and turned her lens to the subject for which she would become known: queer life in 1980s New York. —J.D.