#david wojnarowicz

Add to your summer reading list! Shop catalogues for this season’s new exhibitions, including David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at NightandMary Corse: A Survey in Light—now in the Whitney Shop.

Hello, summer We’re thrilled to be debuting two new exhibitions this month. David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night brings together the artist’s diverse body of work, which spans collage, photography, painting, writing, and activism. Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay: Indigenous Space, Modern Architecture, New Art features the work of seven emerging and established Latinx artists based in the United States and Puerto Rico. Both exhibitions open to the public on Friday, July 13!

As part of our ongoing celebration of Pride this month, we’re highlighting works from three Whitney Collection artists who have either identified with, or fought for, the LGBTQ community through their art. David Wojnarowicz refused a signature style, adopting a wide variety of techniques with an attitude of radical possibility. His work spans photography, painting, music, film, sculpture, writing, and activism. David Wojnarowicz: A History Keeps me Awake at Night opens at the Whitney July 13! 

[David Wojnarowicz with Tom Warren, Self-Portrait of David Wojnarowicz, 1983–84. Acrylic and collaged paper on gelatin silver print, 60 × 40 in. (152.4 × 101.6 cm). Collection of Brooke Garber Neidich and Daniel Neidich]

[David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992), Untitled (Falling man and map of the U.S.A.), 1982. Screenprint: sheet, 23 15/16 x 17 7/8 in. (60.8 x 45.4 cm); image, 12 ½ x 12 ½ in. (31.8 x 31.8 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from the Print Committee 2001.269. © The Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York]

Back by popular demand: on Sunday, September 23, the Whitney will host a screening of Marion Scemama’s film,Self-Portrait in 23 Rounds: A Chapter in David Wojnarowicz’s Life, 1988—1991 (2018). Based on an interview with David Wojnarowicz conducted by Sylvère Lotinger in ‘89, the film intercuts scenes of Wojnarowicz with previously unseen footage from David Wojnarowicz Papers, Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University; P.P.O.W and the Estate of David Wojnarowicz; and Marion Scemama personal archives. Scemama will speak with Whitney Curator David Breslin following the screening.

[Image courtesy Marion Scemama]

ITSOFOMO (In the Shadow of Forward Motion) is a multimedia performance that David Wojnarowicz made in collaboration with composer and musician Ben Neill in 1989. Integrating music, text, and video in a multi-dimensional format, the work embodies the act of acceleration and its sensory manifestations. It is through this frame that Wojnarowicz addressed the accelerating AIDS crisis and the politics of AIDS in the United States at that moment.

The work debuted at The Kitchen in 1989 and has not been performed live in New York in 25 years. This September, Ben Neill and the percussionist Don Yallech, who played alongside Neill and Wojnarowicz in 1989, revisit this fierce meditation on history and power at the Whitney Museum.

Visitwhitney.org for tickets.

[Image courtesy Ben Neill]

disease:

PETER HUJAR / FORBIDDEN FRUIT / 1983
[gelatin silver print | 9 ¾ x 7″]

Here is my very first acrylic painting made with old swiss topographic maps, a picture from David Wojnarowicz and a lot of love :) 

David Wojnarowicz for AIDS awareness week.

Mask, No. 2

Mask No. 1

David Wojnarowicz, ‘Arthur Rimbaud in New York’ series, 1978-79

Arthur Rimbaud in New York, one of David Wojnarowicz’s few incursions into photography, is the articulation of a testimony to urban, social and political change in New York.

Wojnarowicz, using the figure of the accursed poet as the only way for an artist to intervene in reality, chronicles his own life and his emotional relationship with New York City in the late 1970s. The artist portrays himself wearing a mask of the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, thereby taking on his identity and highlighting the parallels in their lives: the violence suffered in their youths, the feeling of being denied freedom, the desire to live far away from the bourgeois environment and the fact of their homosexuality. Wojnarowicz is juxtaposing the historical time of the symbolist poet with the artist’s present.

The series, taken in places that the artist used to frequent with photographer Peter Hujar, represents the emergence of identity politics and queer visibility in contemporary art, and the debates surrounding the public sphere as a space for individual non-conformity that were to shape the 1980s. The series also represents a contemplation of the end of the experimental artists’ collectives on the Lower East Side, as gentrification and urban speculation transformed the neighbourhood, and AIDS had begun to decimate the gay community, also causing the early death of the artist in 1992.

-Salvador Nadales

Update from ilimitablespaces: 

“If I may add something to this, the model in the photos is actually Brian Butterick, David Wojnarowicz’s friend and sometime collaborator. This series was part of Wojnarowicz’s break into the art world but also among his first explorations of art as a personally expressive medium.”

“Rimbaud in Brooklyn” with Brian & Nick (after David Wojnarowicz)