University Park, Pa. -- The Palmer Museum of Art is exhibiting "Fantastic Tales: The Photography of Nan Goldin," a collection that highlights the provocative and often controversial work of artist Nan Goldin, through Dec. 4. The exhibition is a selection of photographs by Goldin lent to the Palmer Museum from the private collection of Gerry and David Pincus. The exhibition will travel to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts after its presentation at the Palmer.
Throughout her career, Goldin has recorded life as it presents itself, sometimes beautifully sweet and sometimes uncomfortably raw. Most often, Goldin has focused her camera on the candid, snapshot portrait of marginal Americans in the tradition of Robert Frank and Diane Arbus, but from the perspective of insider. Her images are highly biographical -- she often is an active participant in the bohemian worlds she documents. As such, her subjects -- her friends -- exude a natural, poignant and at times brutal honesty. Her photographs are simply a diary made public.
In the past year, Goldin's work has been featured prominently in two exhibitions surveying very different aspects of the art world of the last few decades: "SlideShow," organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art, a groundbreaking examination of the use of slide projection as a vital and viable art form in the late 1960s and 1970s; and "East Village USA," a sprawling look at a parochial substratum of the 1980s art scene, staged by the New Museum of Contemporary Art. Goldin is one of only two artists (the other is Jack Smith) to be included in both exhibitions.
A fully illustrated catalog with an essay by noted scholar Jonathan Weinberg, published in association with Penn State Press, will accompany the exhibition.
Museum hours are 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and noon to 4 p.m. on Sunday. Admission is free.
To see photos from the Goldin exhibit, check Penn State Live at http://live.psu.edu/still_life/2005_09_02_goldin/index.html