# @drawingcenter on Instagram

- **Type:** Image
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/Bfi_OJphChv
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/16046154-drawingcenter-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/thumbnails/b787658c00.jpg
- **Posted:** 2018-02-23T16:56:05.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** The Drawing Center (@drawingcenter) — https://gondola.cc/drawingcenter

## Caption

Artists have a variety of methods to make their mark. Every Friday we will share a photograph of an #ArtistInAction. 
David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) is a legendary figure of the East Village art world of the 1980s whose personal and politicized work were fearless in their honesty and courage. Wojnarowicz had a traumatic childhood that led him to flee his home in New Jersey and become a teen hustler in New York City. One of his first artistic projects was his Rimbaud photographic series that featured a figure wearing a mask of the French poet Arthur Rimbaud in locations around the city. By using the mask, Wojnarowicz parallels his estrangement, isolation, and alienating experience of life to that of Rimbaud, who like Wojnarowicz, was a queer man. Often describing the world as “pre-invented” and America as a “one-tribe nation,” Wojnarowicz had extreme feelings of otherness. The rage he felt towards society intensified during the AIDS epidemic. Diagnosed with AIDS himself, and watching his friends suffer and pass away from the disease, was an appallingly painful experience and led him to become an outspoken activist. Wojnarowicz increased the voice and visibility of queer people, and other struggles of difference, through the enormous power and poignancy of his artwork, which he made using a wide variety of media like painting, installation, performance, and writing. “To place an object or piece of writing that contains what is invisible because of legislation or social taboo into an environment outside myself makes me feel not so alone,” he explained. “It is kind of like a ventriloquist’s dummy – the only difference is that the work can speak by itself or act like that magnet to attract others who carried this enforced silence.” #DavidWojnarowicz 
Image: Portrait by Peter Hujar, 1981. Courtesy of the Peter Hujar Archive. “Peter Hujar: Speed of Life,” is on-view at The Morgan Library & Museum through May 20th. themorganlibrary

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## Tags

artistinaction, davidwojnarowicz

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