David Wojnarowicz
His writing and images confronted the neglect, censorship and political indifference surrounding the AIDS crisis.
David Wojnarowicz was born in Red Bank, New Jersey, in 1954. A violent childhood and periods on New York’s streets shaped his early life. Largely self-taught, he worked across writing, photography, painting, film and music.
In the series “Arthur Rimbaud in New York”, figures wearing a mask of the poet appeared in subways, diners and other city settings. During the 1980s Wojnarowicz became part of the East Village art world, combining personal experience with found images, maps, animals and fragments of text.
Photographer Peter Hujar was first his lover and then a close friend and mentor. Hujar’s death from AIDS in 1987, followed by Wojnarowicz’s own HIV diagnosis, intensified an already political practice. “Close to the Knives” (1991) brought grief, desire and anger at institutional indifference into a forceful collection of essays.
Wojnarowicz died of AIDS-related illness in 1992, aged 37. Arguments over his work continued: the Smithsonian’s removal of footage from “A Fire in My Belly” in 2010 prompted protests about censorship. His art remains both a record of particular losses and a challenge to the forces that made those losses easier to ignore.