Thomas McGovern

During the 1980s and 1990s, Thomas McGovern lived in New York photographing for the Village Voice, Visual AIDS, and many other related organizations. His powerful photobook of AIDS-related portraits, Bearing Witness, was published in 1999. The images currently displayed are from a trove McGovern recently donated to the Cerritos College Art Gallery, including both new and vintage prints of important artists and activists of that era such as Ethyl Eichelberger, David Wojnarowicz, Hunter Reynolds, Bill Cullum, Nan Goldin, Ron Vawter, Patrick O’Connell, Annie Sprinkle, and various drag performers and go-go dancers from events such as the Night of a Thousand Gowns and sites like Club Spodee-Odee. The Wojnarowicz image shows the artist in performance reading Horton Hears a Who while wearing a Regan mask during the opening of the exhibition Witness: Against Our Vanishing, organized by Nan Goldin at Artists Space Gallery in New York on Nov 16, 1989. During the reading, David would alternate between reading a page in the children’s book and then turn the page and passionately condemn the Regan Administrations neglect of the AIDS crisis, then turn the page and continue. The Eichelberger image shows the artist during the performance of his self-composed musical and theatrical event, Fiasco, at PS 122 in New York in August of 1988.

Artist David Wojnarowicz Performing at Artists Space in New York, 1989