David Wojnarowicz - Emily B.

Untitled (face in dirt), c. 1990

David Wojnarowicz was a painter, photographer, writer, filmmaker, performance artist, and activist who was prominent in the New York City art world of the 1980s. The product of an extremely difficult childhood brought on by an abusive family life and an emerging sense of his own homosexuality, Wojnarowicz dropped out of high school and was hustling and living on the streets by the age of sixteen. 

Many of Wojnarowicz' works incorporate outsider experiences drawn from his personal history and from stories he heard from the people he met. By the late 1970s he had, in his own words, "started developing ideas of making and preserving an authentic version of history in the form of images/writings/objects that would contest state-supported forms of 'history.'" He continually returned to the personal voices of individuals stigmatized by society. Often overlapping text, paint, collaged elements, and photography, and sometimes organizing them in quadrants or comic strip-like frames, Wojnarowicz created provocative narratives and historical allegories dealing with dialectical themes of order and disorder, birth and death. 

Untitled, 1988

Untitled (Falling Buffalo). 1988-89

One of his most well known photographic works is the series "Rimbaud," which is made up of twenty-four black-and-white photographs of himself and friends holding up a mask of the poet Arthur Rimbaud in a variety of underground settings in New York City. According to Wojnarowicz, he was “playing with ideas of compression of ‘historical time and activity’ and fusing the French poet’s identity with modern New York urban activities, mostly illegal in nature.” The similarities between Rimbaud's life and Wojnarowicz's are striking: They lived exactly a century apart and both died in their late 30s; each came from a broken home with abusive parents; both fled to the big city--Rimbaud to Paris, Wojnarowicz to New York; both were gay, and each found a surrogate father in the form of an older lover--Paul Verlaine for Rimbaud, Peter Hujar for Wojnarowicz. In addition to his work as an artist--which has become more widely recognized over the years--Wojnarowicz was a political activist in the midst of the AIDS crisis, the disease that would eventually take his life. 

  “Arthur Rimbaud in New York” (Duchamp, Pier), 1978-79

Untitled, from the series Rimbaud in New York, 1977-79

Untitled (Peter Hujar), 1989

“If I die of AIDS — forget burial — just drop my body on the steps of the F.D.A.” 

In the late 1980s, after he was diagnosed with AIDS, Wojnarowicz' art took on a sharply political edge, and soon he was entangled in highly public debates about medical research and funding, morality and censorship in the arts, and the legal rights of artists.  In another series of photographs, Wojnarowicz photographed the artist Peter Hujar moments after he died of complications from AIDS. These works contain multiple layers of meaning--stark witness to the death of a lover, elegiac homage to a significant artist, unflinching rage in the face of another AIDS death. 

Wojnarowicz died of AIDS-related illness in New York City in 1992, at the age of 37. He is the author of five books. His artwork is in numerous private and public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Untitled from Ant Series (Spirituality), 1988-89

Untitled (One day this kid…), 1990

"Bottom Line, if people don't say what they believe, those ideas and feelings get lost. If they are lost often enough, those ideas and feelings never return."

Sources: NYU, PPOW Gallery - The Estate of David Wojnarowicz, Queer Arts Resource, Dan Cameron and Dennis Szakacs, New York Times,