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 Als will helm the annual event to be held at the museum on September 15 with the reading of a new, unpublished essay on Diane Arbus's relationship with New York City.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."