Donna Gottschalk

Donna Gottschalk is an American photographer and a lesbian activist born in 1949. She grew up in New York City, in the Lower East Side. She joined the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 1969. The same year she joined the Gay Liberation Front, becoming an active member of the movement. In 1970, she and other activists organised the Lavender Menace action during the National Organisation for Women congress, to protest against the exclusion of lesbians from the women’s liberation movement. In 1971, she moved to San Francisco with her sisters Myla and Mary where she worked as a taxi driver. She then joined a photographic printing company before moving to Connecticut where she established her own lab with a partner. In the late 1990s, she became a nursing auxiliary and moved to Vermont. In 2018, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York organised the first retrospective exhibition dedicated to her work. Throughout her life, Donna Gottschalk kept photographing her loved ones, her siblings, butch, fem, trans, gay activists, comrades and friends. ...

We founded Marcelle Alix in 2009 in Paris and settled in a characteristic, early 20th-century boutique in Belleville. The gallery is for us a creative space, where the dialog with artists is not only meant to selling artworks, but is also based on an equal relationship to creativity. We now represents thirteen artists and two duos. Our identity has been built with the support of the artists who opened our programme (Aurélien Froment, Louise Hervé & Clovis Maillet, Charlotte Moth, Ernesto Sartori, Marie Voignier) and those we introduced to the French art scene (Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz, Ian Kiaer, Donna Gottschalk). During these years, we have supported broad artistic careers (Laura Lamiel, Liz Magor and Mira Schor whose work we represent exclusively in Europe) and accompanied the development of new perspectives in sculpture (Gyan Panchal, Jean-Charles de Quillacq) in video (Lola Gonzàlez), and in drawing (Armineh Negahdari). Our gallery has been a pioneer in defining a space for queer art in France : in addition to showing her work within the artist duo Boudry/Lorenz since 2011, we have directed the translation into French of Renate Lorenz's 2012 seminal book, « Queer Art » in 2018. Since 2019, we have exhibited photographs by Donna Gottschalk documenting the lives of women living with women who were involved in the lesbian movement in the United States in the 1970s. In 2023 we organised an exhibition for the Utopi.e award—first award in France for Lgbtqi+ art—for which we have invited Paris galleries Air de Paris and Sultana as fellow participants. We insist on the central role of a gallery in the ecosystem of art as a place to make idiosyncratic positions visible and weave a critical narrative around the most contemporary visual forms. ...