Hilton Als to Debut New Essay on Diane Arbus as New Museum’s Visionary Speaker

Hilton Als.
Photo: http://www1.cuny.edu.

It’s official: New Yorker writer Hilton Als is the New Museum’s Visionary speaker for 2015. Als will helm the annual event to be held at the museum on September 15 with the reading of a new, unpublished essay on Diane Arbus‘s relationship with New York City.

“Arbus is a perfect vehicle for Als’s meditation,” boasts a press release from the museum. “Running from privilege, she took herself further and further away from anything that could be described as normative and descended into a world teetering on the brink of the void. Like Als, she saw herself in her subjects, but, for her, life became a desperate struggle to disassociate from them.”

Als has been contributing to the New Yorker since 1989, and is best known for his 1996 autobiography The Women. In 2013, he published White Girls, a critically-acclaimed essay collection.

Previous Visionaries include director and screenwriter Darren Aronofsky, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, architect Maya Lin, and “Mad Men” creator Matthew Weiner.

Presale tickets for museum members are available on August 17, while general admission tickets go on sale on August 20.

Related articles:

17 Must-See LGBTQ Exhibitions This Summer

VIDEO: Is the New Museum Triennial Part of the Problem or Part of the Solution?

You Can Now Play Theresa Duncan’s Feminist CD-ROM Games at Rhizome

In a New Book, Alexander Nemerov Looks at his Aunt, Diane Arbus


Follow Artnet News on Facebook:


Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward.