David Wojnarowicz

(American, 1954–1992)

David Wojnarowicz was an American artist and AIDS activist. Throughout his career, he used painting, performance, film, and photography to draw attention to civil rights and gay identity within American popular culture. Many of Wojnarowicz’s projects are drawn from his own life or from individuals he met during his travels: After dropping out of school, Wojnarowicz began hitchhiking across the United States before eventually settling in the New York art scene. While living there with AIDS in the 1980s, he wrote of his art: “I’m in the throes of facing my own mortality and in attempting to communicate what I’m expressing or learning in order to try and help others I am effectively silenced. I am angry.” He is perhaps best known for his black-and-white film A Fire in My Belly (1986–1987) which, 18 years after his death, sparked national controversy. When the piece was exhibited in 2010 at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., protests led by the Catholic League revived a conservative culture war similar to the one that had surrounded photographer Robert Mapplethorpe decades earlier, and brought renewed interest in Wojnarowicz’s life and work. Born on September 14, 1954 in Red Bank, NJ, he grew up partly in New York City, when he returned in the late 1970s and fell in with a group of East Village artists that included Nan Goldin, Kiki Smith, and Peter Hujar, all of whose work explored in on personal identity in various ways. Wojnarowicz's work are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, among others. The artist died of AIDS at the age of 37 on July 22, 1992 in New York, NY.