01/15/2026
Join Visual AIDS on Sunday Jan 25 (1-2:30pm) for an audio-visual panel discussion with David Hirsh, Penny Arcade , and Agosto Machado focused on the David Hirsh Tapes Collection at Visual AIDS. The event will feature clips from interviews with Steve Lott, Martin Wong, and Frank Moore.
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 q***r downtown New York arts scene. 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 panel is introduced by Kyle Croft, executive director of Visual AIDS, and moderated by art historian Marcelo Gabriel Yáñez . It is presented as part of the symposium Locating Downtown, organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art in partnership with New York University Special Collections.
Please RSVP for this free event.
Image: Sheyla Baykal, “Penny Arcade, David Hirsh, and Frank Moore, among others, at the Day With(out) Art Action at the Met”, 1994. Crop from gelatin silver print contact sheet, 8.5 x 11”. Courtesy Sheyla Baykal Archive and Soft Network.
