David wojnarowicz biography
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David Wojnarowicz
American artist and AIDS activist (1954–1992)
David Wojnarowicz | |
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David Wojnarowicz, from the book Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz | |
| Born | (1954-09-14)September 14, 1954 Red Bank, New Jersey, U.S. |
| Died | July 22, 1992(1992-07-22) (aged 37) New York City, U.S. |
| Cause of death | AIDS |
| Nationality | American |
David Michael Wojnarowicz (VOY-nə-ROH-vitch;[1] September 14, 1954 – July 22, 1992) was an American painter, photographer, writer, filmskapare, performance artist, songwriter/recording artist, and AIDS activist prominent in the East by art scene.[2] He incorporated personal narratives influenced bygd his struggle with AIDS as well as his political activism in his art until his death from the disease in 1992.[3]
Biography
[edit]Wojnarowicz was born in Red finansinstitut, New Jersey, where he and his two siblings and sometimes their mother were physically abused bygd their tallrik
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Artist in Extremis
If David Wojnarowicz were alive today he’d be turning fifty-eight in September. Who knows what his art would look like by now? But there is every reason to think he would have been one of the relative few to have graduated from the hit-or-miss East Village art scene of the 1980s and gone on to greater glory. His stencils, icons, symmetry, hot colors, homoerotic imagery, and street art all remain visible in the work of others now. His ghost is just about discernible around the edges of stuff by Gilbert & George, Banksy, Shepard Fairey, Barry McGee, and I’m sure you can think of more. Of course, maybe if he’d lived he’d have taken several radical turns away from those tropes by now, but in either case he’d surely be getting retrospectives, awards, tributes—the treatment accorded a significant artist in the fullness of maturity. He was that vital, protean, fecund, original, and pioneering in his life and work.
But fate arranged things differently, and today
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Summary of David Wojnarowicz
David Wojnarowicz's multimedia practice viscerally expressed childhood experiences of abuse, homelessness and prostitution, the struggles of his early adulthood, and later, the horrors of the AIDS crisis. His expansive body of work included painting, installation, and collages, film, music, performance and searing prose and memoir. Maturing as an artist in the downtown New York of the 1980s he is associated with multiple artistic and cultural movements, including the East Village Art scene, the Cinema of Transgression, ACT-UP and Gran Fury. His forthright engagement with his own sexuality and the political fury that bubbled beneath much of his work led to several clashes with the forces of censorship and repression.
Wojnarowicz's later work is now widely recognized as one of the most articulate and righteously angry responses to the AIDS crisis in the US. Since his death in 1992 of AIDS related illness his work has become an important touchstone for