David Michael Wojnarowicz ( VOY-nə-ROH-vitch; September 14, 1954 – July 22, 1992) was an American painter, photographer, writer, filmmaker, performance artist, songwriter/recording artist, and AIDS activist prominent in the East Village art scene. He incorporated personal narratives influenced by his struggle with AIDS as well as his political activism in his art until his death from the disease in 1992.
Wojnarowicz was born in Red Bank, New Jersey, where he and his two siblings and sometimes their mother were physically abused by their father, Ed Wojnarowicz. Ed, a Polish-American merchant marine from Detroit, had met and married Dolores McGuinness in Sydney, Australia, in 1948 when he was 26 and she was 16. After his parents' bitter divorce, Wojnarowicz and his siblings were kidnapped by their father and raised in Michigan and Long Island. After finding their young, Australian-born mother in a New York City phone book, they moved in with her. During his teenage years in Manhattan, Wojnarowicz worked as a street hustler around Times Square. He graduated from the High School of Music & Art in Manhattan. By 1971, at age 17, Wojnarowicz was living on the streets full time, sleeping in halfway houses and squats.
After a period outside New York, Wojnarowicz returned in the late 1970s and emerged as one of the most prominent and prolific members of an avant-garde wing that used mixed media as well as graffiti and street art. His first recognition came from stencils of houses afire that appeared on the exposed sides of East Village buildings.
Wojnarowicz completed a 1977–1979 photographic series on Arthur Rimbaud, did stencil work and collaborated with the band 3 Teens Kill 4, which released the independent EP No Motive in 1982. He made autonomous super-8 films such as Heroin and Beautiful People with bandmate Jesse Hultberg, and collaborated with filmmakers Richard Kern and Tommy Turner of the Cinema of Transgression. He exhibited his work in well-known East Village galleries and New York City landmarks, notably Civilian Warfare Gallery, Ground Zero Gallery NY, Public Illumination Picture Gallery, Gracie Mansion Gallery, and Hal Bromm Gallery.
Wojnarowicz was also connected to other prolific artists of the time, appearing in or collaborating on works with Nan Goldin, Peter Hujar, Luis Frangella, Karen Finley, Kiki Smith, James Romberger, Marguerite Van Cook, Ben Neill, Marion Scemama, and Phil Zwickler.
In early 1981, Wojnarowicz met the photographer Peter Hujar, and after a brief period as lovers, came to see Hujar as his great friend and mentor. Weeks after Hujar died of AIDS on November 26, 1987, Wojnarowicz moved into his loft at 189 2nd Avenue. He was soon diagnosed with AIDS himself and, after successfully fighting the landlord to keep the lease, lived the last five years of his life in Hujar's loft. Inheriting Hujar’s dark room—and supplies like rare Portriga Rapid paper—was a boon to Wojnarowicz's artistic process. It was in this loft that he printed elements of his ‘Sex Series’ and an edition of “Untitled (Buffalos)”.
Hujar's death moved Wojnarowicz to create much more explicit activism and political content, notably about the social and legal injustices related to the government response to the AIDS epidemic. He collaborated with video artist Tom Rubnitz on the short film Listen to This (1992), a critique of the Reagan and Bush administrations' homophobic responses and failure to address the crisis. The film was shown at MoMA's 2017-18 exhibit Club 57: Film, Performance, and Art in the East Village, 1978–1983.
In 1985, Wojnarowicz was included in the Whitney Biennial's so-called Graffiti Show. In the 1990s, he sued and obtained an injunction against Donald Wildmon and the American Family Association on the grounds that Wojnarowicz's work had been copied and distorted in violation of the New York Artists' Authorship Rights Act.
Wojnarowicz's works include Untitled (One Day This Kid...), Untitled (Buffalo), Water, Birth of Language II, Untitled (Shark), Untitled (Peter Hujar), Tuna, Peter Hujar Dreaming/Yukio Mishima: St. Sebastian, Delta Towels, True Myth (Domino Sugar), Something From Sleep II, Untitled (Face in Dirt), and I Feel a Vague Nausea.
Wojnarowicz also wrote two memoirs in his lifetime including Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration, discussing topics such as his troubled childhood, becoming a renowned artist in New York City, and his AIDS diagnosis and Memories that Smell like Gasoline. Knives opens with an essay about his homeless years: a boy in glasses selling his skinny body to the pedophiles and creeps who hung around Times Square. The heart of Knives is the title essay, which deals with the sickness and death of Hujar, Wojnarowicz's lover, best friend and mentor, "my brother, my father, my emotional link to the world". In the final essay, "The Suicide of a Guy Who Once Built an Elaborate Shrine Over a Mouse Hole", Wojnarowicz investigates the suicide of a friend, mixing his own reflections with interviews with members of their shared circle. In 1989, Wojnarowicz appeared in Rosa von Praunheim's widely acclaimed film Silence = Death about gay artists in New York City fighting for the rights of AIDS sufferers.
Wojnarowicz died at home in Manhattan on July 22, 1992, at the age of 37, from what his boyfriend Tom Rauffenbart confirmed was AIDS.
After his death, photographer and artist Zoe Leonard, a friend of Wojnarowicz, exhibited a work inspired by him, Strange Fruit (for David).
A Fire in My Belly controversy
In November 2010, after consultation with National Portrait Gallery director Martin Sullivan and co-curator David C. Ward but not co-curator Jonathan David Katz, Smithsonian Institution Secretary G. Wayne Clough removed an edited version of footage used in Wojnarowicz's short silent film A Fire in My Belly from the exhibit "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture" at the National Portrait Gallery in response to complaints from the Catholic League, U.S. House Minority Leader John Boehner, Representative Eric Cantor and the possibility of reduced federal funding for the Smithsonian. The video contains a scene with a crucifix covered in ants. William Donohue of the Catholic League claimed the work was "hate speech" against Catholics. Gay historian Jonathan Ned Katz wrote:
In 1989 Senator Jesse Helms demonized Robert Mapplethorpe's sexuality, and by extension, his art, and with little effort pulled a cowering art world to its knees. His weapon was threatening to disrupt the already pitiful federal support for the arts, and once again, that same weapon is being brandished, and once again we cower.
Response from Clough and Smithsonian
Clough later said that although he stood by his decision, it "might have been made too quickly", and called the decision "painful." He said that because of the controversy surrounding the footage and the possibility that it might "spiral out of control", the Smithsonian might have been forced to shut down the entire "Hide/Seek" exhibition, and that was "something he didn't want to happen."
The video work was shown intact when Hide/Seek moved to the Tacoma Art Museum.