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David Wojnarowicz’s “Sex Series” was the first body of work he created in the darkroom of his late friend and mentor, the photographer Peter Hujar. This series reflects the atmosphere of fear and frustration pervading the queer community at the height of the AIDS crisis.

In David’s “Sex Series,” queer activist refusal of shame is expressed visually, subverting pathologizing demonizations of queer sexuality. Homoerotic images are collaged over images of American landscapes: suburban houses, rural trains, cloudy skies. Also included in these collages are images of magnified blood cells, military technology, x-rays, and a barrage of other photos and texts related to sexuality, violence, and politics.

At the time of the series’ creation, David had recently been diagnosed with HIV himself, and had begun participating in meetings and demonstrations with ACTUP—the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power.

Taking the form of negatives, these works employ, through their subversive documentary quality, both a critique and a warning. Viscerally scientific, sexual, and violent, they describe the psychological violence of censorship and erasure within a climate of homophobia, misinformation, and silence.

— Ray Atlas, David Wojnarowicz Foundation Fellow, Spring 2026

SEE link in PROFILE for more than 50 Collections around the globe that hold, preserve and display David's work including his Sex series (1988).

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IMAGES
David Wojnarowicz, “Untitled”, from the Sex Series. 1989 (printed c. 1989–1990). Gelatin silver print. 16 × 20 in

“Untitled”, from the Sex Series. 1989. Gelatin silver print. 14 13/16 × 17 13/16 in

“Untitled (Tanker)”, from the Sex Series. 1989. Gelatin silver print. Dimensions not specified

“Untitled (New York Bridges with Text)”. 1988–1989. Gelatin silver print. 14 13/16 × 17 3/4 in

Photographer Peter Hujar, David’s friend and mentor, died from AIDS-related causes on November 26th, 1987. Immediately after Peter’s death, David photographed his face, hands, and feet, attentively memorializing his illness-wracked body in an act of grief and care. In David’s memoir “Close to the Knives”, he recounted the event:

“… I barely cried. When everyone left the room I closed the door and pulled the super-8 camera out of my bag and did a sweep of his bed: his open eye, his open mouth, that beautiful hand with the hint of gauze at the wrist that held the i.v. needle, the color of his hand like marble, the full sense of the flesh of it. Then the still camera: portraits of his amazing feet, his head, that open eye again—I kept trying to get the light I saw in that eye—and then the door flew open and a nun rushed in babbling about how he’d accepted the church and I look at this guy on the bed with his outstretched arm and I think: but he’s beyond that.” (Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration, 111-12.)

While for viewers, the photographs that make up ““Untitled,” 1987, serve as a visceral portrait of the banality of grief and loss during the AIDS epidemic, David later wondered whether he had “been holding off full acceptance of [Peter’s] dying” with his taking of the photographs. By enacting a “prescribed ritual,” David could detach himself somewhat from the emotional space of the hospital room, directing his attention towards honoring Peter through his friend’s familiar practice of black-and-white portrait photography.

— Ray Atlas, David Wojnarowicz Foundation Fellow, Spring 2026

SEE link in PROFILE for more than 50 Collections around the globe that hold, preserve and display David’s work

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IMAGES: David Wojnarowicz, “Untitled,” 1987. Gelatin silver prints, 10 1/4 x 14 3/4 in.

David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration (Open Road Integrated Media, 2014), 111-12.

#curriermuseum #PeterHujar #DavidWojnarowicz #WojFound @wojfound @peterhujararchive

As David experimented with film and photography, animal imagery made frequent appearances. Of such artworks, David said: “Animals allow us to view certain things that we wouldn’t allow ourselves to see in regard to human activity.”(1)

In the Ant Series (1988-89), distinctions between the natural world and human culture are upended, provoking questions about what constitutes normalcy; what binds and consumes us as humans. Props of everyday life seem to speak to basal human instincts, accentuated as such by the presence of animals. That the animals in question are engaged in a complex hierarchy through which they decompose organic matter suggests the absurdity and destructiveness of human social ordering.

Created during a period of personal loss and medical crisis for David and his community, these works offer a foreboding vision of a society of vicious regulation collapsing on itself. The concepts symbolized by props—violence, language, spirituality—are not shown decaying, but as agents through which a violent and constraining social order is exercised.

— Ray Atlas, David Wojnarowicz Foundation Fellow, Spring 2026

SEE link in PROFILE for more than 50 Collections around the globe that hold, preserve and display David's work

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@harvardartmuseums

IMAGES: David Wojnarowicz, “Untitled (Control)”, 1988. Gelatin silver print

“Untitled (Spirituality)”, 1988. Gelatin silver print

“Untitled (Time/Money)”, 1988. Gelatin silver print

“Untitled (Violence)”, 1988. Gelatin silver print

“Untitled (Desire)”, 1988. Gelatin silver print

“Untitled (Language)”, 1988. Gelatin silver print

Barry Blinderman, “The Compression of Time: An Interview with David Wojnarowicz,” in David Wojnarowicz: Tongues of Flame, ed. Laurie Dahlberg (Normal, IL: University Galleries, 1990), 58.

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David Wojnarowicz’s Shop Posters series (1983-85) raises a critique of the systems of value production that regulate social exchange. The discarded “sale of the week” posters upon which David screenprinted his designs were created with the help of art director Keith Davis, who found the posters and allowed David to use his silkscreen equipment to create them.

By inserting a living hand and collaborative artistic vision into the process of automated production, David raises questions of whether the collective shaping of such posters is revelatory, or was already there, intrinsic to the consumerist image. Works such as “Jean Genet Masturbating in Metteray Prison (London Broil),” 1983, printed over a butcher’s advertisement reading “USDA Choice Beef Shoulder—London Broil,” juxtapose erotic and food imagery, reflecting themes of sustenance, accessibility, and desperation, as well as the permittance of certain forms of imagery over others in public space.

The posters (and painting of a shop poster, “Queer Basher/Icarus Falling”, 1986)seem at home in their surroundings, yet also to expose them. They are at once intimate and communal, acts of questioning and affirmation, descriptions of spaces, refusals of delineations between public and private, retakings of visibility on one’s own terms, and social diagnoses. But are they advertisements?
— Ray Atlas, David Wojnarowicz Foundation Fellow, Spring 2026

SEE link in PROFILE for more than 50 Collections around the globe that hold, preserve and display David’s work including his Shop Posters series (1983-1985).
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IMAGES:

“Jean Genet Masturbating in Metteray Prison (London Broil),”1983; “Queer Basher/Icarus Falling,” 1986. Spray paint and acrylic on board, 72 × 48 in; “Savarin Coffee,” 1983. Synthetic polymer paint on supermarket poster, 43 1/2 × 32 in; “Chicken Legs,” 1983. Collage, screenprint, and string, 33 1/2 × 24 1/2 in.

The connection David Wojnarowicz felt with 19th Century French poet Arthur Rimbaud was born from similarities in their lives. Both existed in unstable societies, came from a hard upbringing, and aimed to use art as a form of resilience and resistance. Their work reflects their means of survival through the recording of their surroundings. Both strove to push the limits of their methodologies achieving a reflection of their ideals and resistance against the hardships they faced.

David and Arthur Rimbaud take on similar themes in their work—turning their surroundings into “materials” and pushing the limits in their visual recording. Wojnarowicz’s reverence for Rimbaud’s work suggests a “mentor” and "successor" relationship. Despite living a hundred years apart in very similar social and political environments their works aim to do similar things. David chose to reflect on these parallels as an artist, through his “Arthur Rimbaud in New York” photo series imagining Rimbaud existing under very similar circumstances in a completely different time and place. The visual displacement shown in these photos is a powerful way of delivering this idea.

Both artists' lives were cut short at age 37, which adds to their mystique and shared experience— leading to the question of whether or not David might be to subsequent generations what Arthur Rimbaud was to him... Might a young artist living in the 21st Century recognize similarities with David’s time and draw parallels between the two? How could this be visualized in a way that pushes limits in the use of one's surroundings as materials, just as Rimbaud and Wojnarowicz once did?

— Oyku Derin Ersoy, David Wojnarowicz Foundation Fellow, Fall 2025

SEE link in PROFILE for more than 50 Collections around the globe that hold, preserve and display David's work including his "Arthur Rimbaud in New York" series (1978-1980).

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Image: Oyku Derin Ersoy, "Young Artist in Rimbaud Mask," 2025, digital collage. Underlying portrait courtesy @bulldozcer

#ArthurRimbaud #Rimbaud #DavidWojnarowicz #WojFound @wojfound

“Persona: Photography and the Re-Imagined Self” at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum features four silver gelatin prints from David Wojnarowicz’s “Arthur Rimbaud in New York” series February 19 - May 10, 2026.

Like in David’s series, Zanele Muholi mobilizes the tradition of black-and-white photography as a mode of witnessing lived realities in their documentary portraiture of queer South Africans. Their use of frontal composition, sharp tonal contrast, and direct gaze out at the viewer produce an encounter grounded in dignity and presence. The subject’s face is not merely shown but asserted; to look is to acknowledge a citizen whose existence has been violently contested despite post-apartheid legal protections.

David’s series, while similarly bearing witness to the lived realities of a marginalized community, insists on the right of the subject to anonymity, rather than visibility. In a landscape where surveillance and regulation were weaponized against queer communities, obscuring the face of the subject became protective and strategic. The masked figure of Rimbaud embodies a particular lifestyle, a window into a societal experience, while denying the violence of identification.

David’s and Muholi’s series are both archival and relational: affirming the historical presence of queer lives, while placing the control of exposure in the hands of the subject. Together, their representational choices, while different, demonstrate how black-and-white photography can function as testimony, honoring marginalized lives while illuminating the political stakes of being seen.

— Ray Atlas, David Wojnarowicz Foundation Fellow, Spring 2026

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IMAGES: Zanele Muholi, Basizeni XI, Cassilhaus, North Carolina, 2016. © Zanele Muholi. Courtesy of the artist and Yancey Richardson, New York; David Wojnarowicz, Arthur Rimbaud in New York (subway), 1978-79/2004. Gelatin silver print, 11 x 14 in.

#Gardnermuseum #ClaudeCahun #ArthurRimbaud #Rimbaud #DavidWojnarowiczWojFound@wojfound

This is your reminder to go see “Persona: Photography and the Re-Imagined Self” at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum! The exhibition features four silver gelatin prints from David Wojnarowicz’s “Arthur Rimbaud in New York” series, running February 19 - May 10, 2026.

We see a contemporary counterpart to David’s strategy of self-obscuring autobiography in Narcissister’s “Untitled Self-Portrait Series (Pink Nails),” 2012. Using a plastic, mannequin-like mask and kitschy props, Narcissister exaggerates conventional beauty standards while disrupting conventions of erotic portraiture. The mask’s obscured gaze liberates the artist from social perception, leaving the viewer a distanced witness to an act of radical self-valuation.

In David’s series, the mask of Arthur Rimbaud functions as a tool of physical transformation, self-reflexivity, and reconstruction, offering an artistic framework for self-understanding detached from literal depiction. Photographically fixed at age seventeen, Rimbaud moves through New York’s familiar yet ever-changing urban sceneries as a marginal presence resisting identification.

Together, these works illuminate an ongoing feminist and queer dialogue in which visibility, disguise, and performance have functioned as tools of survival, affirmation, and revolt. In both series, masking becomes a revolutionary act: a means by which to claim bodily autonomy, resist regulation, and assert self-ownership in the face of marginalization.

— Ray Atlas, David Wojnarowicz Foundation Fellow, Spring 2026

SEE link in PROFILE for more than 50 Collections around the globe that hold, preserve and display David’s work including his “Arthur Rimbaud in New York” series (1978-1980).

VISIT @gardnermuseum

IMAGES: Narcissister (American), Untitled Self-Portrait Series (Pink Nails), 2012. C-Print, 80 x 105.41 cm (31 1/2 x 41 1/2 in.) © Narcissister. Photo courtesy of the artist; David Wojnarowicz, Arthur Rimbaud in New York (sitting/pier, gun), 1978-79/2004. Gelatin silverprint, 14 x 11 in.

#Gardnermuseum #ClaudeCahun #ArthurRimbaud #Rimbaud #DavidWojnarowiczWojFound@wojfound

“Persona: Photography and the Re-Imagined Self” at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (February 19 - May 10, 2026) features four silver gelatin prints from David Wojnarowicz’s “Arthur Rimbaud in New York” series (1978-79).

Seen alongside Claude Cahun’s “I am in training don’t kiss me,” 1927, David’s series enters a longer queer lineage of self-portraiture through disguise, performance, and refusal. Working decades earlier with their partner Marcel Moore, Cahun used costume and character to explore and refuse gender binaries. This print theatrical staging of an ambiguous harlequin character may be seen as prefiguring the surrealist legacies employed in David’s Rimbaud series.

David staged photographs of a small group of his friends, collaborators and lovers wearing Arthur Rimbaud’s face as a mask in locations throughout New York City. This character’s anonymity provided a lens through which to express the daily realities of a particular way of life while refusing the violence of being named, categorized, or contained. The masked figure moves through diners, subways, piers, and streets, bearing witness to the city’s precarity as a detached observer.

In both artists’ work, the use of persona in self-portraiture is not an act of concealment, but a revolt. Through a refusal of definition, they together resist definitive interpretation of the fixed or knowable self, forging autonomy and self-authorship.

— Ray Atlas, David Wojnarowicz Foundation Fellow, Spring 2026

SEE link in PROFILE for more than 50 Collections around the globe that hold, preserve and display David’s work including his “Arthur Rimbaud in New York” series (1978-1980).

VISIT @gardnermuseum

IMAGES: Claude Cahun (French, 1894–1954), I am in training don’t kiss me, 1927. Gelatin silver print, 11.7 x 8.8 cm (4 5/8 x 3 1/2 in.) Photo courtesy of the Jersey Heritage Collections; David Wojnarowicz, Arthur Rimbaud in New York (under Brooklyn Bridge), 1978-79/2004. Gelatin silverprint, 14 x 11 in.

#Gardnermuseum #ClaudeCahun #ArthurRimbaud #Rimbaud #DavidWojnarowiczWojFound@wojfound

The Hite Institute of Art + Design at University of Louisville, KY, presents MISSING: When East Village Artists Came to Main Street (March 20–May 2, 2026) at the Cressman Center. The exhibit documents the 1985 Missing Children Show featuring work by some of “the new irascibles,” a group of artists heralded by Arts Magazine for defining New York’s new East Village avant-garde scene—David, Judy Glantzman, Rich Colicchio, Kiely Jenkins, and Futura 2000. The exhibition is co-curated by Hite faculty Jennifer Sichel and Chris Reitz.

Join us Friday, March 20 for a lecture & discussion 3-4pm and reception 5-7pm.

@hiteart@jenn_sichel @51xrichcolicchio @i_am_arteeest @futuratwothousand @judyglantzman #DavidWojnarowicz #Wojnarowicz @wojfound

The Hite Institute of Art + Design at University of Louisville, KY, presents MISSING: When East Village Artists Came to Main Street (March 20–May 2, 2026) at the Cressman Center. The exhibit documents the 1985 Missing Children Show featuring work by some of “the new irascibles,” a group of artists heralded by Arts Magazine for defining New York’s new East Village avant-garde scene—David, Judy Glantzman, Rich Colicchio, Kiely Jenkins, and Futura 2000. The exhibition is co-curated by Hite faculty Jennifer Sichel and Chris Reitz.

Join us Friday, March 20 for a lecture & discussion 3-4pm and reception 5-7pm.

@hiteart@jenn_sichel @51xrichcolicchio @i_am_arteeest @futuratwothousand @judyglantzman #DavidWojnarowicz #Wojnarowicz @wojfound

The Hite Institute of Art + Design at University of Louisville, KY, presents MISSING: When East Village Artists Came to Main Street (March 20–May 2, 2026) at the Cressman Center. The exhibit documents the 1985 Missing Children Show featuring work by some of “the new irascibles,” a group of artists heralded by Arts Magazine for defining New York’s new East Village avant-garde scene—David, Judy Glantzman, Rich Colicchio, Kiely Jenkins, and Futura 2000. The exhibition is co-curated by Hite faculty Jennifer Sichel and Chris Reitz.

Join us Friday, March 20 for a lecture & discussion 3-4pm and reception 5-7pm.

@hiteart@jenn_sichel @51xrichcolicchio @i_am_arteeest @futuratwothousand @judyglantzman #DavidWojnarowicz #Wojnarowicz @wojfound

The Hite Institute of Art + Design at University of Louisville, KY, presents MISSING: When East Village Artists Came to Main Street (March 20–May 2, 2026) at the Cressman Center. The exhibit documents the 1985 Missing Children Show featuring work by some of “the new irascibles,” a group of artists heralded by Arts Magazine for defining New York’s new East Village avant-garde scene—David, Judy Glantzman, Rich Colicchio, Kiely Jenkins, and Futura 2000. The exhibition is co-curated by Hite faculty Jennifer Sichel and Chris Reitz.

Join us Friday, March 20 for a lecture & discussion 3-4pm and reception 5-7pm.

@hiteart@jenn_sichel @51xrichcolicchio @i_am_arteeest @futuratwothousand @judyglantzman #DavidWojnarowicz #Wojnarowicz @wojfound

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts holds David Wojnarowicz’s "Dust Track I (Primary Title)," 1990, in its collection.

This gelatin silver print represents David’s fascination with patterns pressed into dust underfoot by tire tracks and boot-prints.

He first made these images for the catalog of his 1990 retrospective "Tongues of Flame," curated by Barry Blinderman at University Galleries at Illinois State University. Later, he overlaid them with his own text and articles taken from newspapers to create images in the dark room he had newly inherited from his mentor Peter Hujar.

SEE link in PROFILE for more than 50 Collections around the globe that hold, preserve and display David's work.

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Dust Track I (Primary Title), 1990. Gelatin silver print 14 × 18 7/8 in

@vmfamuseum #DavidWojnarowicz #Wojnarowicz @wojfound

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts holds David Wojnarowicz’s "Dust Track I (Primary Title)," 1990, in its collection.

This gelatin silver print represents David’s fascination with patterns pressed into dust underfoot by tire tracks and boot-prints.

He first made these images for the catalog of his 1990 retrospective "Tongues of Flame," curated by Barry Blinderman at University Galleries at Illinois State University. Later, he overlaid them with his own text and articles taken from newspapers to create images in the dark room he had newly inherited from his mentor Peter Hujar.

SEE link in PROFILE for more than 50 Collections around the globe that hold, preserve and display David's work.

VISIT @vmfamuseum

Dust Track I (Primary Title), 1990. Gelatin silver print 14 × 18 7/8 in

@vmfamuseum #DavidWojnarowicz #Wojnarowicz @wojfound

David’s "Just a Little Bit of the Tin Drum Mentality," 1984 is in the collection of MSN Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.

MSN curators write, "[The work] is inspired by Volker Schlöndorff’s film The Tin Drum (1979), an adaptation of Günter Grass’s 1959 novel... [which] Wojnarowicz ...describ[ed] as “very strange and beautiful.” .....Of his collages from the 80s, Wojnarowicz wrote... “First there is the World. Then there is the Other World. The bought-up world; the owned world. The world of coded sounds: the world of language, the world of lies. The packaged world; the world of speed in metallic motion. The Other World where I’ve always felt like an alien.”

MSN Warsaw is a public institution that collects works of art, and studies and disseminates the tangible and intangible legacy of contemporary culture. The museum cooperates with a range of groups and communities, as well as institutions in Poland and around the world.

SEE link in PROFILE for more than 50 Collections around the globe that hold, preserve and display David's work.

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IMAGE: David Wojnarowicz, Just a little bit of the Tin Drum Mentality, 1984, collage, acrylic, wood stick, string and globe, 48 x 48 x 17 ins.

@msnwarszawa #DavidWojnarowicz #Wojnarowicz @wojfound

David’s "Just a Little Bit of the Tin Drum Mentality," 1984 is in the collection of MSN Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.

MSN curators write, "[The work] is inspired by Volker Schlöndorff’s film The Tin Drum (1979), an adaptation of Günter Grass’s 1959 novel... [which] Wojnarowicz ...describ[ed] as “very strange and beautiful.” .....Of his collages from the 80s, Wojnarowicz wrote... “First there is the World. Then there is the Other World. The bought-up world; the owned world. The world of coded sounds: the world of language, the world of lies. The packaged world; the world of speed in metallic motion. The Other World where I’ve always felt like an alien.”

MSN Warsaw is a public institution that collects works of art, and studies and disseminates the tangible and intangible legacy of contemporary culture. The museum cooperates with a range of groups and communities, as well as institutions in Poland and around the world.

SEE link in PROFILE for more than 50 Collections around the globe that hold, preserve and display David's work.

VISIT @msnwarszawa

IMAGE: David Wojnarowicz, Just a little bit of the Tin Drum Mentality, 1984, collage, acrylic, wood stick, string and globe, 48 x 48 x 17 ins.

@msnwarszawa #DavidWojnarowicz #Wojnarowicz @wojfound

The David Wojnarowicz Papers at New York University's Fales Library and Special Collections offer an intimate chance to explore the thought behind David’s work.

A strong-willed and incredibly uncompromising artist, David left many journals, audio recordings, stencils, screen prints, sketches, notes, letters, plans for unfinished projects and other materials that make up this archive. Both the conceptual and methodological layers available offer a personal perspective on David’s life and craft. They operate as a living map of his work, personal life, relationships, and an insight into how he navigated his life as a queer person during a complex time encompassing the AIDS crisis.

In their raw and unedited form, David’s journals and audio recordings reveal his urgent need to document his environment and experiences. In one intimate recording, he shares thoughts and dreams about the passing of his mentor, photographer Peter Hujar. Some of David’s famous works such as Untitled (Burning House) can be seen in different sketch forms, as utensils, screen prints, etc. This repetition of one of his most well known images provides a very interesting exploration of his methods of archiving, recording, and reusing words and visuals. He also wrote many untitled songs, short texts and poems – some later incorporated into his visual work.

These archives hosted at NYU are open to the public. Finding Aids and digitized materials are always available on their website but the physical archives are also accessible via appointment. Younger artists who might be inspired by a creator like David Wojnarowicz would be happy to explore the materials available in this collection that offer a raw but tender look into how Wojnarowicz’s documentation of his daily experiences resulted in his artistic contributions.

— Oyku Derin Ersoy (Pratt Institute, 2026), The David Wojnarowicz Fellow, Fall 2025

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Images: Oyku Derin Ersoy, Documentation of a Visit to The David Wojnarowicz Papers, The Downtown Collection, Fales Library and Special Collections, NYU

@faleslibrary @nyulibraries #DavidWojnarowicz #WojFound @wojfound