Join us for an audiovisual panel discussion focused on The David Hirsh Tapes Collection at Visual AIDS. This panel was originally scheduled as part of the symposium Locating Downtown, presented in partnership with New York University Special Collections.
Between 1990 and 1995, the journalist David Hirsh recorded hundreds of hours of interviews and oral histories, spread over nearly six hundred tapes, with over three hundred artists who were active in the queer downtown New York arts scene. Doing three to four interviews a week as he worked as the on-staff art critic for the Downtown LGBTQ weekly newspaper the New York Native (published 1980-1997), Hirsh’s scope was wide-reaching in terms of the artists he recorded, spanning multiple generations from well-established older artists to the young and emerging. Hirsh’s relentless preservation effort through the tapes, as well as the Visual AIDS Archive he co-founded in 1994 with artist Frank Moore (1953–2002), was a race against time during the most fatal years of the AIDS crisis in the United States. In 2025, Hirsh donated his entire tape collection to Visual AIDS, who has recently secured a grant to digitize and make the tapes available to the public.
The program features selected audio excerpts alongside a slide show of work by the artists discussed. David Hirsh and artists Penny Arcade and Agosto Machado will speak from both lived experience and a historical perspective, touching on the role of the weekly newspaper in the formation of “Downtown,” community archives and their methodologies in documenting queerness and the ongoing HIV/AIDS pandemic, as well as the challenges of recuperating the memory of understudied artists who died during the height of the AIDS crisis.
The panel is introduced by Kyle Croft, executive director of Visual AIDS, and moderated by art historian Marcelo Gabriel Yáñez.
