This catalog accompanied the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 2018 retrospective, David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night, curated by David Breslin and David Kiehl.
The exhibition and catalog showcase David’s “fiercely political and highly personal” multimedia work, created over his lifetime. The breadth of David’s work in every medium is examined: paintings, photographs, installations, performances, and writing. The catalog includes work first seen in East Village storefront galleries in the early 1980s, highly political work made at the height of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and images from his last series, “Flower Paintings.”
Essays by curator David Breslin and artist/writer Gregg Bordowitz, Director, Fales Library and Special Collections Marvin J. Taylor, Novelist Hanya Yanagihara, and artist/curator Julie Ault evaluate David’s work beyond labels such as “East Village,” “Queer,” “Postmodern,” and “Neo-expressionist.” The catalog includes essays by curator David Kiehl on each series in David’s oeuvre and a biographical dateline by David Wojnarowicz and Cynthia Carr.
Additional resources re: David Breslin and David Kiehl, David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2018.