This Color Is Who I Am

Sidedoor

Smithsonian Institution

Museum, Air And Space, Society & Culture, National Museum, Tony Cohn, Sidedoor, Natural History, African American History And Culture, Postal Museum, History, American History, History Of The World, Exhibits, Art19, Pop Culture, Smithsonian, The Smithsonian, Science, Washington, National Zoo, Zoo, Dc, Exhibit

4.6 • 2.3K Ratings

🗓️ 28 November 2018

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Artist Frank Holliday's social circle in the 1980s was a who's who of New York City cool: Andy Warhol, Cyndi Lauper, RuPaul, Keith Haring, and even Madonna. But Frank's odyssey through the art world also placed him at the center of an epidemic that would shake the entire country. In honor of World AIDS Day, Sidedoor takes a look at America's early HIV/AIDS Crisis through the eyes of an artist whose life and work were changed by it forever.

This episode features recordings from the "Visual Arts and the AIDS Epidemic" Oral History Project produced by the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Just a quick warning. This episode contains mature themes that might not be appropriate for all ages. This is Side Door, a podcast from the Smithsonian with support from PRX.
0:20.7	I'm Halima Shaw.
0:30.0	We're going back to the early 1970s. New York City.
0:31.0	A 16 year old kid from Greensboro, North Carolina has just arrived in New York
0:37.0	to chase his dream of becoming a professional dancer. His name is Frank Holliday. And here is how he remembers Manhattan's East Village.
0:47.0	There was nothing. I mean it was burnout buildings and it was blocks that were just like falling down and abandon.
0:54.8	You would kept $20 in your pocket for the mugger and the rest of your money in your shoe
1:00.5	because you were going to get held up.
1:03.0	New York was a whole different world for a young gay kid from North Carolina.
1:08.4	During his early time in the city, where he still lives today, Frank accidentally stumbled into one of its earliest gay pride parades.
1:15.7	I just kind of walked up Fifth Avenue with these people and into the meadow and all these like lesbians with like curly hair.
1:27.0	He worked for Andy Warhol.
1:30.0	I went to the opening of Studio 54.
1:33.0	And he used to party with Madonna.
1:34.8	It was a very busy time.
1:36.6	Frank was in the city to chase his dream of starting a career in professional dance.
1:41.8	But that career derailed before it could start by an acid trip in a museum.
1:48.4	My friend Andy Rees, who was also a dancer, he gave me LSD one day and took me to Museum of Modern Art and I had never seen Modern Art and it was all of modern art happened that day for me.
2:06.6	And I quit dancing the next day.
2:08.3	And I said, no, I went to the mama
2:10.6	and I knew that that's what I had to do. But what makes Frank's story
2:15.0	amazing and important is that this Odyssey puts him in the middle of the New York
	...

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