David Wojnarowicz

(1954 - 1992)

A New York City–based artist, David Wojnarowicz died at the age of thirty-seven of AIDS in 1992. His art—shots of photographer Peter Hujar dying of AIDS, film captured with his Super 8, stencils, sculptures, paintings, and music—often drew the ire of religious lobbyists, who successfully pushed the National Endowment for the Arts to withdraw funding for exhibitions containing his works. “To enter one of Wojnarowicz’s texts,” wrote the novelist Hanya Yanagihara, “is to be sucked immediately into its undertow…This writing wants you to follow it, and you want to follow it, too.”