Queer Images As Survival Tools: Ariel Goldberg

Disloyal

“The thing that I am fighting against is the same thing that I think that the impulse to found the Lesbian Herstory Archives in 1974 was. We are in a life struggle project, which is to stop erasure and build stronger coalitions with people that are battling a lot of repression. And I think that liberatory projects absolutely depend on intergenerational knowledge sharing.”

-Ariel Goldberg

Last year, the Jewish Museum of Maryland presented an exhibition titled Material/Inheritance: Contemporary Work by New Jewish Culture Fellows. Curated by Leora Fridman and presented in partnership with the New Jewish Culture Fellowship, this groundbreaking show featured 30 Jewish artists dealing with themes like chosen and biological family, queer and trans identities, embodiment and sexuality, diasporic homes, ritual reinventions, activist movements, political histories, and so much more.

One of the artists featured in Material/Inheritance, Ariel Goldberg, contributed to the exhibition by creating an episode of the Disloyal podcast with co-hosts Mark Gunnery and Naomi Rose Weintraub.

Ariel Goldberg is a writer, curator, and photographer based in New York City who curated a show titled Images on which to build, 1970s-1990s. That exhibition, which is on view at the Chicago Cultural Center through August 4, 2024, explores photographic documentation of activism, education, and media production within lesbian, trans, queer, and feminist grassroots organizing from the 1970s through the 1990s. It was commissioned by the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati as part of the 2022 FotoFocus Biennial, and was on view at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York City last year.

On this episode of Disloyal, Goldberg talks about their research into the Lesbian Herstory Archives (LHA) traveling slideshows, reading texts related to that project, and playing audio from interviews they did with the LHA’s Joan Nestle and Alexis Danzig. They also spoke to Disloyal hosts Mark Gunnery and Naomi Rose Weintraub about queer imaging practices, the importance of intergenerational knowledge sharing in queer communities, and ways that images and education fit into social movements.

Read Ariel Goldberg's curatorial statement here.

This episode features “Angry Atthis” by Maxine Feldman and “Prove it on Me,” a cover of a Ma Rainey song, by Bell’s Roar aka Sean Desiree. Thank you to Helen Thornton and Sean Desiree for permission to include these songs.

You can see Ariel Goldberg on Tuesday, May 14, on Zoom or at the Center for New Jewish Culture in Brooklyn, New York, where they will be hosting an event called Abundant, Rich Lives: Returning to the Lesbian Herstory Archives Slideshow. Ariel will be in conversation with longtime activists Alexis Danzig and Deborah Edel about the Lesbian Herstory Archives slideshow, and they will screen clips of a recently digitized version of it. The panel will also reflect on media production within lesbian, queer, and trans grassroots organizing of the recent past and its relevance for today’s social movement struggles. Click here for more information.