David Wojnarowicz (1954 -1992) was among the most incisive and prolific American artists of the 1980s and 90s. Wojnarowicz’s work has been included in solo and group exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The American Center, Paris, France; The Busan Museum of Modern Art, Korea; Centro Galego de Art Contemporanea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain; The Barbican Art Gallery, London; and the Museum Ludwig, Cologne.

His work is in permanent collections of major museums nationally and internationally and his life and work have been the subject of significant scholarly studies including Cynthia Carr’s Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz (2012), winner of a Lambda Literary Award for “Gay Memoir/Biography’’ and finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize awarded by Columbia Journalism School and the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University. Wojnarowicz has had retrospectives at the galleries of the Illinois State University, curated by Barry Blinderman, 1990, and at the New Museum, curated by Dan Cameron, 1999.

A third retrospective, David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night, co-curated by David Kiehl and David Breslin, opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in July 2018. The widely acclaimed exhibition traveled to the Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid in May 2019, and the Musee d/Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg City in November 2019. A concurrent exhibition of Wojnarowicz’s films and photographs opened at the KW Berlin in 2019. Wojnarowicz: Fuck You Faggot Fucker, a comprehensive feature-length documentary directed by Chris McKim, premiered in November 2020 and was named one of 2021’s best documentaries by Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, Esquire, and IndieWire, among others. In 2022, the solo exhibition Dear Jean Pierre: The David Wojnarowicz Correspondence with Jean Pierre Delage, 1979-1982 at P·P·O·W unveiled an archive of letters, drawings, and photographs from Wojnarowicz’s early career, followed by the release of a catalogue published by Primary Information in 2023.

This past September, P·P·O·W and the David Wojnarowicz Foundation mounted a citywide series of programs in celebration of the artist’s would-be 70th birthday, with screenings, performances, and activations taking place at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art; and the NYC AIDS Memorial.