There’s a spark to the art of David Wojnarowicz, the prolific visual artist, writer and Aids activist. His work so often feels alive, with possibility, with danger, and sometimes with fear. Whether in one of his most famous images, in which a herd of buffalo are tumbling down a cliff, or street art murals like The Missing Children Show (1985), where an exploding house is flanked by a viewfinder that stares down a series of cadavers, with Earth lingering above in orbit, an uncaring sentinel.

Now, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art is preparing to exhibit a series of Wojnarowicz’s most iconic images, Arthur Rimbaud in New York (1990), in which the artist and a collection of friends were photographed throughout New York, wearing masks of the French poet’s face. This comes alongside a new publication edited by the exhibition’s curator, Antonio Sergio Bessa, with new writing on Wojnarowicz alongside Rimbaud in New York. Rimbaud captures the core of Wojnarowicz’s artistic process: a sense of collaboration and artistic community; a formal inventiveness, where the artist does a lot with a little; and a keen, politically-charged eye, which here casts itself over the transformations of New York and the artist’s own childhood.

Wojnarowicz’s art drew on the narratives of his own life, the political landscape in which he found himself, and the artistic community of which he was a part. With a lo-fi, punk aesthetic and a refusal to look away from the world around him, his art continues to galvanise, challenge, and frighten in equal measure, even decades after his death.

A IS FOR AMERICA

Despite his travels to Europe – even going to Paris with the intent of living there in 1978 – America is inescapable in the art of David Wojnarowicz. Whether railing against the politics of his time, or creating imagery that challenged images and ideas of Americana, Wojnarowicz’s art is constantly grappling with the contradictions and violence of life and death in the United States 

B IS FOR BUFFALOS

If there’s an image by Wojnarowicz that you recognise, even if you think you know nothing about the artist, then it’s Untitled (Buffalos) (1988-89). It’s been used on the cover of the U2 single “One”, and as a poster for Ari Aster’s film Eddington (2025). Wojnarowicz’s original image comes from a diorama in the Smithsonian of buffalo being herded off a cliff, plummeting to their death (a native American hunting method). Taken in the years following the artist’s Aids diagnosis, it becomes a critique of his country’s mistreatment of those who contracted the disease.

C IS FOR CINEMA OF TRANSGRESSION 

Wojnarowicz was a constant collaborator, creating work alongside other artists in the East Village avant-garde; people like Peter Hujar, Nan Goldin, and Kikki Smith. He appeared in films by Richard Kern and directed alongside Tommy Turner, his creative impulses always searching for new outlets. And so it’s no wonder that he would also find himself involved in the Cinema of Transgression: low-budget, experimental films designed to shock. 

D IS FOR DEATH

The spectre of death looms large in Wojnarowicz’s work. His buffalo are frozen on an inevitable descent to the grave; some of his most famous, unsettling images are of friends in their final moments, and in a comic book project he worked on with the artist James Romberger, sex and death are intertwined as two bodies together create a bizarre, violent moment of flesh coming apart. Death was everywhere in Wojnarowicz’s life, and would serve as a major catalyst in his work. Yet whenever he looks at death, he always seems to be daring it to look back at him.

E IS FOR EAST VILLAGE

The community of artists that sprang up around New York’s East Village is a constant presence in Wojnarowicz’s art and life. Not only for the collaborations that came about from it, but the impact it had on his own art and life. When Wojnarowicz’s friend and mentor Peter Hujar died, Wojnarowicz moved into his late friend’s loft and, with access to his dark room and materials, would transform his practice yet again.

F IS FOR FDA

Some of the most famous images associated with Wojnarowicz don’t come from his art at all. And one of them is of Wojarnwicz at an ACT UP protest, his back to the camera. He’s wearing a leather jacket emblazoned with a pink triangle, and the words “IF I DIE OF AIDS — FORGET BURIAL — JUST DROP MY BODY ON THE STEPS OF THE FDA.” The FDA (Food and Drug Administration) was often targeted during Aids activism, including Seize Control of the FDA, a 1988 march in which activists demanded that the US government speed up the research and approval of a drug to combat Aids.

G IS FOR GRAFFITI

Graffiti and street art were at the genesis of Wojnarowicz’s expansive artistic practice. From the image of a burning house that would recur through his career, spray-painted on cars along the Bowery in New York, to expansive murals like the dystopia of toppled monuments, monsters, and firearms that make up History keeps me awake at night (1986). This visual language also feels like the genesis of his activism; creating work designed to animate people beyond the walls of art world institutions.

H IS FOR HUJAR

The lives of David Wojnarowicz and Peter Hujar were entwined with one another. They met in 1981 and were briefly lovers, although Wojnarowicz would go on to see Hujar as his closest friend and artistic mentor. Hujar’s diagnosis with Aids would go on to become one of the transformative moments in Wojnarowicz’s art: the title essay in his book Close to the Knives details Hujar’s passing, and Wojnarowicz would photograph the artist on his deathbed.

I IS FOR INKBLOTS

The art that Wojnarowicz made in collaboration with the artist Kikki Smith seems, at first glance, rudimentary. A silkscreen of simple drawings with vividly coloured, Rorschach-test-like inkblots in colours like red and green layered over the top. And yet they seem to capture the unique and complicated nature of Wojnarowicz’s practice. These simple line drawings of faces and bodies seem to almost drown in the expanding inkblots, layers of psychology lingering beneath the surface, in conversation with the suffering of Wojnarowicz’s own childhood,

J IS FOR JESUS

In Untitled (Spirituality), from Wojnarowicz’s 1988-89 Ant Series, the insects crawl over a small statue of a crucified Christ. The abusive home in which Wojnarowicz grew up was a Roman Catholic one, and the Church loomed large in the Aids activism that defines so much of his art and legacy. It’s no wonder Christ would appear in his work, and that this would, then and now, be controversial. Yet, Wojnarowicz’s Christ doesn’t feel like a blasphemous or abject figure. Silently taking on suffering, crawling with insects, he instead feels politically charged, hoping for a better world even when that seems impossible.

K IS FOR KINSHIP

Wojnarowicz’s art and life were tied to ideas of creative or political communities. The East Village avant-garde; the protests of ACT-UP. But there’s often a streak of loneliness to it, especially in his prose. In the short piece Spiral, Wojnarowicz writes, “I’m an empty stranger, a carbon copy of my form. I can no longer find what I’m looking for outside myself.” And so now, even decades after his loss, there’s a bittersweet kinship to the work left behind, that lingering loneliness in Wojnarowicz’s work is able to make us feel less alone, generations later.  

L IS FOR LISTEN TO THIS

An experimental documentary made with Tom Rubnitz, and left unfinished at the time of both artist’s death, Listen To This exists between political anger, and avant-garde montage; in which Wojnarowicz uses the media of television to attack itself and the power structures that it props up, grappling with his own mortality and how he is – and isn’t – treated with fundamental humanity, all intercut with images from popular culture; everything from footage of space, to Madonna.

M IS FOR MASS MEDIA

Wojnarowicz, then, understood the power that mass media can have in shaping the way people understand art and politics. Whether in the energy of his street art pieces, and the recurring motif of the burning house that would appear in much of his early work, to the fury of Listen To This. After all, in Rubnitz’s experimental film, Wojnarowicz declares, “Because I speak to you from inside this little box, you tend to believe me. And you give my image and my words authority.”

N IS FOR NO MOTIVE

At first glance, being part of a no-wave punk group that released a single album might seem out of place with the rest of Wojnarowicz’s work, yet it ends up fitting in perfectly with his artistic ethos. Even though he never learned to play anything – and so the band used toy instruments – 3 Teens Kill 4 and their lone album, No Motive, capture the core of Wojnarowicz’s artistic MO, what curator Antonio Sergio Bessa calls “doing so much with the barest means”.

O IS FOR ONE DAY THIS KID

At the centre of Untitled (One Day This Kid) (1990) is an image of Wojnarowicz himself as a child. With a wide, toothy grin and a buttoned-up shirt, the artist-as-child is innocent, unharmed. And yet the tragedy of the piece is Wojnarowicz’s own knowledge that such safety could never last. Surrounding his childlike image are fragments of texts that reveal not only ageing and aching in his soul, but displacement, pain, and political awakening in the face of a world that would never simply let this kid be this kid.

P IS FOR PARIS

Wojnarowicz had a sister who lived in Paris, and the artist went out to visit her in 1978. This trip to Europe would cause creative and personal sparks for the artist. Not only would it serve as the genesis for Rimbaud in New York, and create political parallels between the French city and the city he called home back in the US, but he would also fall in love when he met Jean-Pierre Delage.

Q IS FOR QUEER

To use a single word to sum up Wojnarowicz’s complicated, multifaceted life and work would be to do him a disservice. But still, queerness – in the sense of sexual identity, of being an outsider, being out of step with normative society – is one of the animating factors. Whether in the political fury of the writing in Close to the Knives, or the tenderness of Untitled (1990), a drawing of two shirtless men kissing, superimposed over a map of the world, Wojnarowicz has become a major figure in how contemporary queer activists and artists might align themselves.

R IS FOR RIMBAUD

Writing in response to the Rimbaud in New York exhibition at Leslie-Lohman, Sergio Bessa writes that Wojnarowicz was attracted to the parallels between Rimbaud’s teenage vagrancy and his experience as “the child of a disrupted household”. By donning a mask of the French poet – an essay by Nicholas Martin in the Leslie-Lohman catalogue argues that Rimbaud was “hot currency in New York City in the 70s” — Wojnarowicz seemed to find a personal and creative kindred spirit.

S IS FOR SILENCE = DEATH

Rosa Von Praunheim’s 1990 documentary is a tapestry of political and artistic communities responding to living through the Aids crisis. It also features one of Wojnarowicz’s most furious moments of political speech, as he declares, “I wake up every morning in this killing machine called America, and I carry this rage like a blood-filled egg”, a grisly, poetic evocation of trying to survive in a society that seemed so indifferent to the idea of snuffing out Wojnarowicz and his contemporaries.

T IS FOR TAPING

One of the creative pursuits that Wojnarowicz would engage in throughout his life and career was diaristic in nature. Whether keeping written journals or spoken recordings. For the artist, each seemed to be a specific language that he tried to get to grips with. In a tape recorded in November or December of 1988, he confesses, “I just can’t stand my self-consciousness when talking into this thing.” This work, simplistic and confessional in its drive, was eventually published as The Weight of the Earth: The Tape Journals of David Wojnarowicz.

U IS FOR URGENCY

No matter the form that Wojnarowicz’s art took – written, painted, sprayed, recorded, spoken – it always seemed animated by a personal and political urgency. No art could ever exist in a vacuum and Wojnarowicz understood this; his wall murals from the 1980s about lost children, his autobiographical and political writing, the gonzo comic-book aesthetics of his street art. Wojnarowicz was an artist who always seemed to be desperately shaking the world around him awake to their circumstances.

V IS FOR VIOLENCE

Wojnarowicz often used similar forms to his contemporaries in both art and activism. For instance, both he and Keith Haring created street art in response to the AIDS crisis, work that was politically charged and carried with it the risk of police action. But Wojnarowicz was animated by something very different. Where Haring’s art was communal, welcoming and often ecstatic in its desires and bringing together of bodies, Wojnarowicz’s was animated by violence; burning buildings, men pointing guns at onlookers, and in Untitled (Green Head) (1982) two acrylics show the image of a head, one green and one yellow. The yellow head, on the right-hand side, is shattered, as if blown open by bullets or artillery.

W IS FOR WANDERING

At the tail end of his teenage years, in the 1970s and early 1980s, Wojnarowicz was living on the street after a childhood marked by displacement and violence. During this time, Wojnarowicz produced The Waterfront Journals, a collection of monologues from the figures that he met during his time sleeping rough. Even in this precarious, sometimes dangerous situation, Wojnarowicz created work of surprising intimacy, forever speaking to and for those on the margins.  

X IS FOR X-RAYS

As a medical procedure, the X-ray is designed to offer a look inside the human body, at bones, muscles, and organs. It comes as no surprise that some of Wojnarowicz’s most furious writing uses this idea as its jumping-off point. In Postcards From America: X-Rays From Hell (published in Close to the Knives), Wojnarowicz grieves for himself, his friends, his country, describing his diagnosis as bringing clarity to “the sense of death in the American landscape”.

Y IS FOR YOUTH

Wojnarowicz’s art was often a response to his own youth or the youth culture that surrounded him. Whether in the autobiographical nature of One Day This Kid, or even Rimbaud in New York, a series that uses a portrait of the poet by Etienne Carjat, one in which the youthful face of the poet becomes a symbol of uncompromising youth for Wojnarowicz and his collaborators.

Z IS FOR ZOE LEONARD

Given that Wojnarowicz was such a prolific collaborator, it’s no surprise that others would make work inspired by his own art and activism. One of the most powerful examples of this is Zoe Leonard’s Strange Fruit (1992-97), an installation of rotting fruit skins made in response to the deaths of the Aids crisis. First shown the same year that Wojnarowicz died, Leonard’s work echoes not only her sense of loss, but of community, borrowing artistic techniques – the sewing up of the fruit skins – from her departed friend.

David Wojnarowicz: Arthur Rimbaud in New York is running at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art until 18 January 2026.