Donna Gottschalk

https://awarewomenartists.com/en/artiste/donna-gottschalk/ Donna Gottschalk grew up in the tenement housing of New York’s Lower East Side. As a teenager, while studying at the High School of Art and Design, she got to know the city’s gay and lesbian bars (Kooki’s, Paula’s and Colony), highly dangerous venues at the time, controlled by the Mafia. She produced political posters and documents and began photographing LGBTQI activist groups from the age of 17, on joining the Gay Liberation Front (GLT). She can be seen holding the poster “I am your worst fear / I am your best fantasy” in the famous picture taken by photojournalist Diana Davies (born 1938) during the first gay and lesbian demonstration, Christopher Street Day in New York, a celebration marking the first anniversary of the Stonewall riots. She met photographer Joan E. Biren (JEB, born 1944) at the Black Panther Party convention, to which Angela Davis had invited the GLF. JEB appears in many of D. Gottschalk’s photographs of the time.