Nan Goldin And Lydia Lunch Honored By The Kitchen At Spring 2018 Gala

The Kitchen's Spring 2018 Gala celebrates Nan Goldin and Lydia Lunch, two iconic American artists whose careers were borne of, deeply influenced, and have now engrained in collective memory the underground artistic spirit and political underpinnings of pre-gentrification Downtown New York subcultures (May 16). The evening features performances by New York's own post-punk band Bush Tetras, saxophonist and vocalist James Chance, and Australian singer JG Thirlwell & Ensemble with special guests. The after-party, hosted by Nicolas Jaar, will include a DJ set by Veronica Vasicka as well as performances by Retrovirus along with Lydia Lunch.

In 1980, at The Kitchen, Nan Goldin presented slides (as part of Dubbed in Glamour, a program organized by legendary curator Edit DeAk as "3 Nights of Spectacle and Extravagance") that proved to be the seeds for her famed diaristic slideshow of snapshot portraits, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. In 1994, she returned to the space to present three new slideshows-in-progress-The Other Side, documenting life in drag and transgender communities in 70s-90s New York; a series of self-portraits; and a portraits of three friends who had died of AIDS.Goldin's portraiture captured LGBT life at an intersection of ecstasy and tragedy, conveying the thrill of challenging cultural norms (with all their mainstreamed sexual shaming and oppression), but also the tyrannies of illness at the height of the AIDS epidemic. Goldin didn't turn her lens away from any of it.

Goldin has continued to address the relationships between intimate portraiture and larger cultural structures-recently documenting her own opiate addiction in self-portraits and forming P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) to advocate for addiction treatment and education in the midst of a mounting opioid crisis. As she recently wrote in Artforum, "I survived the opiate crisis; I narrowly escaped. I went from the darkness and ran full speed into The World...I decided to make the private public by calling [the Sackler family] to task."

Renowned for her role as a progenitor of No Wave music in New York, Lydia Lunch found a home at The Kitchen for her witty, savage, and liberated multidisciplinary experimentalism-encompassing music, books, spoken word performances, film, video, photography, and poetry. In 1985, Lunch gave a reading entitled Have Mouth Will Travel, and premiered her collaboration with filmmaker Richard Kern, The Right Side of My Brain. A year later, she presented her solo performance crusade against the Reagan-led Republican government, The Uncensored Lydia Lunch: A Discourse on Sex, Money, Politics, and the American Way of Life, and in 1987 at The Kitchen she premiered the film The Gun Is Loaded, "a brutally frank manifesto in a journey through the heart of contemporary American darkness" (The New York Times). In 1991, she performed Conspiracy of Women a spoken word tirade (recently re-released by Nicolas Jaar) against male-dominated society in an evening shared with filmmaker Beth B that also included the premiere of their collaborative work Thantopsis.

Lunch's self-described "positive nihilism" reflects the frustrations of a city and country at the dawn of neoliberalism. She notes that "the war is never over," and calls on art to be "the universal salve to all of our traumas and where we come together in stubborn resistance."

The Gala will take place on Wednesday, May 16 at The Kitchen (512 West 19th Street, NYC) and begin at 6:00 PM with cocktails and hors d'oeuvres. Dinner designed by Chef Camille Becerra will start at 7:30 PM, during which Bibbe Hansen and Luc Sante will make toasts in between performances, and the after-party with performances hosted by Nicolas Jaar will start at 9:30pm.

Individual tickets, starting at $1,000; tables, starting at $10,000; after-party tickets at $100; for additional information regarding ticket availability contact Kerry Scheidt at The Kitchen at 212-255-5793 x 20 or via email at kerry@thekitchen.org.

The Honorary Chairs for The Kitchen's Spring Gala 2018 include Jane Friedman, Jim Jarmusch, Miuccia Prada, Michael Zilkha. Gala Co-Chairs include Wade Guyton, Cristina Enriquez-Bocobo and Michael Kantrow, Brian Phillips.

The Spring Gala 2018 Benefit Committee includes: Jennifer and Jonathan Allan Soros, Laurie Anderson, Augusto Arbizo, Kyra Tirana Barry, Marie Abma and Dike Blair, Jae Choi / the Collective Shift, Judith L. Church, James Cohan, Paula Cooper, Katie Cusack, Polly Motley and Molly Davies, Debevoise & Plimpton LLP, Bryce Dessner, Matthew Doull, Melanie Shorin and Greg S. Feldman, Arthur Fleischer, Jr., Charlotte Feng Ford, David Friend / Vanity Fair, Marian Goodman Gallery, Julie Graham, Mark Guiducci, Agnes Gund, Douglas Hand, Hilary and Peter Hatch, Hauser & Wirth, Alfredo Jaar, Margaret Sundell and Reinaldo Laddaga, Chum Langhorne, Lévy Gorvy, Barbara London, Robert Longo, Robert Molnar, Bob Monk, Frank Monterisi / Related Companies, Nico Muhly, Kate and Laura Mulleavy, Oliver Newton, Sukey and Mike Novogratz, Dr. Catherine Orentreich, Garland Hunter and Matthew Ritchie, Cecile Barendsma and Tracey Ryans, Melissa Schiff Soros, Cindy Sherman, Robert Soros, Sam Tsao, Mila and Tom Tuttle, Van Doren Waxter, Sofia and James von Moltke, Illya Szilak and Christopher E. Vroom, Thea Westreich Wagner and Ethan Wagner, Suzy Coue-Wilson and Edward Wilson, Debra Singer and Jay Worthington.

About Nan Goldin

Photographer Nan Goldin is recognized internationally for her intimate yet iconic mode of portraiture that captures New York City's post-punk, New Wave scene-portraying the experiences of a close-knit circle of friends in images that nevertheless grappled with some of the time's greatest social crises, from the AIDS epidemic to drug addiction. Many of these pictures appeared in her landmark work The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, slides from which Cookie Mueller introduced at The Kitchen in 1980 as part of Dubbed in Glamour, a festival organized by Edit DeAk. This landmark work grew into a forty-five minute multimedia presentation with more than 700 photographs accompanied by a musical soundtrack, whose recent restaging at the Museum of Modern Art was widely celebrated. Goldin went on to create more works using this slideshow format, several of which she premiered at The Kitchen in 1994. Her work has been the subject of two major touring retrospectives: one organized in 1996 by the Whitney Museum of American Art and another, in 2001, by the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and Whitechapel Art Gallery, London. Goldin's work has also expanded to fashion photography, with collaborations including Alexander McQueen, Helmut Lang, Saint Laurent, Rodarte, Prada, and Dior among many others. In recent months Goldin has founded the group P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) that advocates for addiction treatment and education in the midst of a mounting opioid crisis.

About Lydia Lunch

Musician and artist Lydia Lunch is celebrated as a radical progenitor of No Wave music whose numerous films and performance works at The Kitchen have engaged power structures and political systems from an unapologetically feminist perspective. A multitalented artist and frequent collaborator, Lunch began her career in music, founding the band Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, whom Brian Eno later included on his seminal record No New York that defined the No Wave scene. Lunch went on to collaborate and record music with luminary figures including Nick Cave, JG Thirlwell, Sonic Youth, and Cypress Grove among countless others. Described as a confrontationalist, Lunch's music is bold and direct, with her lyrics and fearless delivery challenging traditional depictions of women, and paving the way for a younger generation of empowered female musicians. Lunch's unwavering advocacy against corruption and censorship is exemplified in her spoken word, which she brought to The Kitchen in 1986 for her performance entitled "The Uncensored Lydia Lunch: Sex, Money, Politics, and the American Way of Life." Over the past thirty years she has also presented a number of films at The Kitchen in collaboration with directors Beth B, Richard Kern, and Merrill Aldighieri and Joe Tripician. In these works Lunch crafted intimate and candid portraits of desire that challenged traditional models of relationships and power dynamics, consistently foregrounding the perseverance of women. A veteran of the East Village scene and The Kitchen community in its earliest years in Chelsea, Lunch defined much of this fertile period in our history, and continues to be push the boundaries of transgressive music and spoken word performance. She has performed around the world with her band Retrovirus and, continually deflying categorization, has published several books and displayed her visual art in multiple exhibitions. In a changing political climate Lunch's steadfast commitment to resistance in the face of injustice, war, and imbalances of power is well worth celebrating

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