David Wojnarowicz

The Whitney Museum of American Art hosted a major retrospective, David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night in 2018, which was co-curated by the Whitney's David Kiehl and art historian David Breslin. It received international praise.

Secretary Clough issued a statement standing by the decision, spoke at a Town Hall Los Angeles meeting, and appeared at a public forum in April 26–27, 2011.

On December 15, a panel discussion was held at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. On December 20, a panel discussion was held at the Washington, D.C. Jewish Community Center. On January 20, 2011, the Center of Study of Political Graphics held a protest at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.

In Spring 2011, P.P.O.W. gallery showed Spirituality, an exhibition of Wojnarowicz's drawings, photographs, videos, collages, and personal notebooks; in a review in The Brooklyn Rail, Kara L. Rooney called the show "meticulously researched and commendably curated from a wide array of sources, ... a mini-retrospective, providing context and clues for Wojnarowicz's often elusive, sometimes dangerous, and always brutally honest work."

In November 2010, after consultation with National Portrait Gallery director Martin Sullivan and co-curator David C. Ward but not with co-curator Jonathan David Katz, G. Wayne Clough, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, removed an edited version of footage used in Wojnarowicz's short silent film A Fire in My Belly from the exhibit "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture" at the National Portrait Gallery after complaints from the Catholic League, Minority Leader John Boehner, Rep. Eric Cantor and the possibility of reduced federal funding for the Smithsonian. The video contains a scene with a crucifix covered in ants. William Donohue of the Catholic League claimed the work was "hate speech", against Catholics. Gay historian Jonathan Ned Katz wrote:

On December 2, 2010, protesters against the censorship marched from the Transformer Gallery, to the National Portrait Gallery. The art work was projected on the building. On December 5, activists Michael Blasenstein and Michael Dax Iacovone were detained and barred from the gallery for holding leaflets.

Wojnarowicz died in his Manhattan home on the night of July 22, 1992, from what his boyfriend, Tom Rauffenbart, confirmed was AIDS. After his death, photographer and artist Zoe Leonard, who was a friend of Wojnarowicz, exhibited a work inspired by him, entitled "Strange Fruit (for David)".

In 1992, the band U2 adopted the iconic tumbling buffalo photograph, 'Untitled (Buffaloes)', for the cover art of their single "One". The band further adapted this imagery during their Zoo TV Tour. This single and subsequent album became multi-platinum over the next few years, and the band donated a large portion of its earnings to AIDS charities. The oversized gelatin print of Wojnarowicz's 'Untitled (Buffaloes)' sold at auction in October 2014 for $125,000, more than four times the estimated price.

On October 11, 1992, activist David Robinson received wide media attention when he dumped the ashes of his partner, Warren Krause, on the grounds of the White House as a protest against President George H.W. Bush’s inaction in fighting AIDS. Robinson reported that this action was inspired by Wojnarowicz's 1991 memoir Close to the Knives, which imagined "what it would be like if, each time a lover, friend or stranger died of this disease, their friends, lovers or neighbors would take the dead body and drive with it in a car a hundred miles an hour to Washington DC and blast through the gates of the White House and come to a screeching halt before the entrance and dump their lifeless form on the front steps." In 1996, Wojnarowicz's own ashes were scattered on the White House lawn.

In 1989 Senator Jesse Helms demonized Robert Mapplethorpe's sexuality, and by extension, his art, and with little effort pulled a cowering art world to its knees. His weapon was threatening to disrupt the already pitiful federal support for the arts, and once again, that same weapon is being brandished, and once again we cower.

Wojnarowicz was also connected to other prolific artists of the time, appearing in or collaborating on works with artists incluing Nan Goldin, Peter Hujar, Luis Frangella, Karen Finley, Kiki Smith, Richard Kern, James Romberger, Marguerite Van Cook, Ben Neill, Marion Scemama and Phil Zwickler. In 1987 his longtime mentor and lover, the photographer Peter Hujar, died of AIDS, and Wojnarowicz himself learned that he was HIV positive. Hujar's death moved Wojnarowicz to create much more explicit activism and political content, notably around the injustices, social and legal, inherent in the response to the AIDS epidemic.

In 1985, he was included in the Whitney Biennial's so-called Graffiti Show. In the 1990s, Wojnarowicz sued and successfully issued an injunction against Donald Wildmon and the American Family Association on the grounds that Wojnarowicz's work had been copied and distorted in violation of the New York Artists' Authorship Rights Act.

He was also the author of several successful books, often about political and social issues of the 1980s relating to the AIDS epidemic. One of his bestsellers, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration, is an autobiography made up of creative writing discussing topics such as his troubled childhood, becoming one of the most renowned artists of his time in New York City, and his AIDS diagnosis. Knives opens with a visceral essay about his homeless years: a boy in glasses selling his skinny body to the paedophiles and creeps who hung around Times Square. The heart of Knives is the title essay, which deals with the sickness and death of the photographer Peter Hujar, Wojnarowicz's one-time lover, his best friend and mentor, "my brother, my father, my emotional link to the world". In the final, gargantuan essay, "The Suicide of a Guy Who Once Built an Elaborate Shrine Over a Mouse Hole", he investigates the suicide of a friend, mixing his own reflections with interviews with members of their shared circle.

Wojnarowicz made super-8 films, such as Heroin, and Beautiful People with Jesse Hultberg, completed a 1977-1979 photographic series on Arthur Rimbaud, did stencil work; collaborated in the band 3 Teens Kill 4, which released the independent EP (music) No Motive in 1982. He exhibited his work in well-known East Village galleries and New York City landmarks, notably Civilian Warfare, Ground Zero Gallery NY, Public Illumination Picture Gallery, Gracie Mansion and Hal Bromm.

After a period outside New York, he returned in the late 1970s and quickly emerged as one of the most prominent and prolific members of an avant-garde wing that used mixed media as well as graffiti and street art. His first recognition came from stencils of houses afire that appeared on the exposed sides of buildings in the East Village.

David Michael Wojnarowicz (/ˌ v ɔɪ n ə ˈ r oʊ v ɪ tʃ / VOY -nə-ROH -vitch; (September 14, 1954 – July 22, 1992) was a Polish-American painter, photographer, writer, filmmaker, performance artist, songwriter/recording artist and AIDS activist prominent in the East Village art scene. He incorporated personal narratives influenced by both his struggle with AIDS as well as his political activism in his art until his death from the disease in 1992.