NAN GOLDIN

Through her activism with the group P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), Goldin has also emerged as a powerful voice for accountability in the arts. Her campaign pressured major museums, universities, and cultural institutions to cut ties with the Sackler family, prompting a wider public and legal reckoning over the opioid crisis and the responsibilities of its key benefactors.

Early life and background

Goldin grew up in the suburbs of Boston; her older sister Barbara’s suicide when Goldin was eleven became a defining trauma that informs her ongoing focus on loss, addiction, and chosen family.

She left home as a teenager, fell in with bohemian circles in Boston and New York, and studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where she began photographing friends in queer bars, apartments, and nightclubs using saturated colour and available light. Goldin has lived between New York, Paris, and Berlin, and has described ‘residing mostly in airports’, reflecting an itinerant life intertwined with art, nightlife, and activism.

Nan Goldin Artworks

Nan Goldin’s artworks are grounded in lived experience, using snapshot-style colour photography, slideshows, and moving-image installations to depict love, sexuality, gender nonconformity, domesticity, addiction, and mortality with unvarnished immediacy.

Goldin’s photographs of drag queens, sex workers, lovers, and friends—along with self-portraits that record overdose, withdrawal, and domestic violence—have become touchstones in contemporary art and documentary photography, influencing generations of artists and shaping visual culture’s understanding of queer life and intimacy.

The Ballad of Sexual Dependency

Between 1979 and 1986 Goldin developed The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, a projected slide show with music that chronicles her ‘chosen family’ in the New York underground, from crowded bars and bedrooms to hospital wards and funerals.

First shown in clubs and then in galleries and museums, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency has become one of the late 20th century’s most influential artworks, reframing documentary photography as an immersive, time-based, and deeply autobiographical art form.

Other key series and works

Goldin’s series The Other Side focuses on drag queens and trans women, celebrating gender fluidity and self-fashioning long before such subjects were widely represented in mainstream art institutions.

Works such as Sisters, Saints and Sibyls and Memory Lost weave archival images, new photographs, and sound to address trauma, family history, and drug dependency, extending Goldin’s practice into installation and exploring addiction as both personal story and shared social crisis.

Photography and activism: PAIN and the opioid crisis

Drawing on her own addiction to prescription opioids after surgery, Goldin founded P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) to pressure museums and universities to cut ties with the Sackler family, whose company Purdue Pharma aggressively marketed OxyContin.

Through highly visible ‘die-in’ protests at institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, the Louvre, and Harvard Art Museums, Goldin’s art and activism helped catalyse a sector-wide reckoning with ‘philanthropy’ funded by the opioid crisis.

Select Awards and Recognition

Goldin has received major honours including the Hasselblad Award in Photography, the Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres in France, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and the Edward MacDowell Medal for her contribution to American culture and the arts.

Her work has been the subject of significant retrospectives at institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and features in museum collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Nan Goldin Exhibitions

Nan Goldin has been included in landmark exhibitions such as the Whitney Biennial and has had major solo presentations across Europe and the Americas, underscoring her impact on contemporary photography and time-based art. Her touring retrospectives have travelled from New York to Paris, Madrid, London, Porto, Turin, and Warsaw, cementing Goldin’s status as a key figure in late 20th- and 21st-century art history.

In 2026, Gagosian Davies Street presented all 126 photographs from The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, Nan Goldin’s documentary series of New York’s East Village between 1973 and 1986.

Select solo exhibitions

• Nan Goldin, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (retrospective, 1996)
• Nan Goldin, Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; touring to London, Porto, Turin, Warsaw (retrospective, c. 2001)
• Chasing a Ghost, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York (2006)
• Memory Lost, Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris (2019)
• Explore Nan Goldin, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco (including Memory Lost)

Select group exhibitions

• Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1985)
• Exhibitions at Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid; Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki; Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Nan Goldin FAQs

Ocula | 2026