Artist Voices: The David Hirsh Tapes at Visual AIDS

Join Visual AIDS for an audio-visual panel discussion focused on our David Hirsh Tapes Collection as part of the symposium Locating Downtown, presented by the Whitney Museum of American Art in partnership with New York University Special Collections. 

Registration is required to attend this free event. 

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 (1946-2013), 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 slideshow 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.

Speakers

Penny Arcade aka Susana Ventura is a performance artist, actress, poet, and theater maker. Her text-based work is known for its humor, high content, and highly quotable wit and focuses on community building as the goal of performance and performance as a transformative act. Her dedication to social practice and activism began in 1977 when she identified herself as an advocate for other artists. She continues in this role as an international community elder and icon of artistic resistance.

David Hirsh cofounded the Visual AIDS Archive in 1994 with artist Frank Moore. He was a prolific art critic from 1990 to 1994, writing about gay and lesbian art for the New York Native and the Bay Area Reporter. He also co-organized a four-week Dance Festival of Lesbian Choreographers,and helped place the Martin Wong Collection of Graffiti Art at the Museum of the City of New York.

Agosto Machado is a singular figure of the Downtown arts scene. He is a Chinese-Spanish-Filipino-American performance artist, activist, archivist, muse, caretaker, and friend to countless celebrated and underground visual and performing artists. He has been a vital participant and witness to cultural and creative life in New York since the early sixties, from art, theater, performance, and film to social and political counterculture and the dawn of the gay liberation movement.

Marcelo Gabriel Yáñez is an art historian, photographer, and archivist based between New York and Puerto Rico. He holds a PhD in Art History from Stanford University, and he is currently adapting his dissertation, “The Disappearance of Landscape: Artists on Fire Island, 1937-1987," into a book. He works part-time between the Archives of American Art and the Department of Art History at New York University.

Kyle Croft is the executive director of Visual AIDS where he works to preserve the legacies of artists lost to AIDS and support a global community of artists living with HIV.