Nan Goldin to sell print to support Ms. Rachel’s Gaza fundraiser
Goldin is selling a print of her 2007 photograph 'Ava twirling, NYC' in an online auction.
Pop Culture
Nan Goldin, the celebrated diaristic photographer and activist, is selling a print of one of her works to support a fundraiser for children in Gaza presented by Rachel Accurso, the children’s educational YouTuber best known as Ms. Rachel.
Accurso organized the benefit sale, titled “Colors That Survived,” with Artists Support, a charitable initiative that partners with artists internationally to raise funds and awareness for various causes.
In the past year, Accurso has become a prominent voice supporting children in Gaza and has been in direct contact with children living through the genocide. Many of those children have shared their artwork with her and she has curated her selection of works for inclusion in the sale.
The sale included prints in editions of 20 of original artwork made by the children. While the sale was expected to run for 11 more days, it has already sold out online and raised a total of $67,716.
Goldin, who is Jewish, joined in the effort—offering a print of her 2007 photograph Ava twirling, NYC through an online silent auction backed by Artists Support. The website shows the auction ends at 4 p.m. ET on Monday.
It has so far received one $15,000 bid from an anonymous bidder, who wrote: “Thank you for your support of the children of Gaza!”
“I can never forget the children of Gaza and I am grateful to be allowed this opportunity to help them in some meaningful way. The war on Gaza is a war on children wiping out multiple generations, erasing the future,” Goldin said in a statement.
“I witness the constant terror the children in Gaza live with, while supporting their families and taking on adult roles, but I also see the joy in their faces; graduating from school, singing together, and learning to love and rescue animals. The children who survive will need to be nurtured and learn to hope, after living through such unimaginable horrors."
Ms. Rachel presents sale of art made by children in Gaza
The sale notes that the artworks have been reproduced as prints in limited editions of 20, each priced at $220.
Adam Schrader
Goldin has long been a figure for social justice, through her work and her activism, and she has long argued that art and activism are inseparable.
Beginning in the 1970s, Goldin’s work has been central to the visual record of queer life in New York and other cities, documenting LGBTQ communities at a moment when they were largely absent from mainstream media and cultural institutions. Her images became an informal archive of a community under siege during the height of the AIDS epidemic.
Her photography has also confronted domestic violence with unusual directness. One of her best-known self-portraits shows her face bruised and swollen after being assaulted by a partner, an image that still challenges taboos around depicting abuse within intimate relationships.
Goldin has photographed heroin addiction, recovery, relapse and sobriety among herself and those closest to her across multiple bodies of work.
And after surviving addiction to prescription opioids herself, Goldin founded the Prescription Addiction Intervention Now, a group that staged protests inside major museums to call attention to the role of the Sackler family, the makers of OxyContin, in the opioid crisis.
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