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It’s Nan Goldin Night at the Tomorrow Theater

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Artist-activist can mean so many things. But few have embodied the identity as successfully as the photographer Nan Goldin. Watch director Laura Poitras’s 2022 documentary about Goldin, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, which the Tomorrow Theater is screening in collaboration with the gallery Nationale on Thursday (7pm, $15) and you’ll see what I mean by embodied.

Goldin is a pioneer of making the personal political through her art. In the ’80s, while trying to exhibit personal photos, some documenting the course of her own abusive relationship, curators told her—if you can believe it—“Nobody photographs their own life.” Undaunted, Goldin instead toured the images around clubs in New York, projecting them as a slide show that eventually made up the singularly influential book The Ballad of Sexual Dependency in 1986. Many of these astoundingly gorgeous photos, tragically cloaked in pain, love, and gutter elegance, feature in Poitras’s film. They help set up the section devoted to Goldin’s artistic coming of age, and her activism during the AIDs crisis among a downtown milieu including such underground art heroes as David Wojnarowicz and Peter Hujar. The film’s other narrative thread is about Goldin’s efforts to take down the Sackler family, who are both one of America’s most significant arts philanthropists and the owners of Purdue Pharma, the company that invented OxyContin and, in turn, profited outrageously off the opioid crisis.

After a surgery led Goldin into her own opioid addiction, she founded the activist group PAIN (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) in the late 2010s, leading protests inside major museums including the Met to disgrace the Sackler name. Goldin was once again putting herself on the line, her physical body as a protester, but also her hard-won career. At the time, the Met had both a namesake Sackler wing and a few Nan Goldins in its permanent collection; today, the Goldins remain, and the institution is looking for a new name for its Ancient Egypt wing.

More Things to Do This Week

books Olufunke Grace Bankole

Tue, Feb 4 | Literary Arts, FREE

In her debut novel, Portland author Olufunke Grace Bankole draws from her own experience growing up between Nigeria and the US to cast a vivid picture of immigration hurdles and families separated by geography and natural disasters. The Edge of Water (Tin House) is set across continents, between Nigeria and New Orleans, and told primarily through letters exchanged between Esther and her daughter Amina as Amina moves to the US and starts her own family, just before Hurricane Katrina strikes.

Faena1_xor0fh It’s Nan Goldin Night at the Tomorrow Theater — Scenes from Dylan Hankins’s latest play, *Faena*, put on by the Portland Experimental Theatre Ensemble.

theater Faena

7:30pm Fri–Sun, Jan 31–Feb 2 | Coho Theater, $12–15

Víctor, the virile matador at the center of playwright Dylan Hankins’s latest, dies at some point in this bawdy bullfighting tragicomedy. That’s not a spoiler (it’s spelled out in all caps in the press release) but instead a hallmark of esperpento, the bitterly ironic Spanish literary form of parody Hankins is working in here. Performed in Castilian Spanish with live English interpretation, the play lists six content warnings, including deviant sexuality and scatological humor. This limited run is part of the Portland Experimental Theatre Ensemble’s PETE Presents, a program supporting up-and-comers.

visual art Ahnika Wood and Karina Rovira

Thru Feb 22 | Stelo Arts, FREE

Printed in an inky blue on swaying sheer lengths of silk, the photos in I Know This Place By Heart came out of an eight-year collaboration between Wood, who lives in Portland, and Rovira, who’s based between Berlin and Amsterdam. “The production of selfhood is an ongoing collaboration,” the artists write in the press release. Cataloging that process, of finding and/or creating oneself, they go on, has been like holding up mirrors between each other. Bouncing light and point of views, together they found a new and perhaps truer to life approach to self portraiture.