The Dallas Museum of Art holds four photographs from David Wojnarowicz’s 1978–79 “Arthur Rimbaud in New York” series, inspired by the French symbolist poet.
These four images feature places that David frequented in New York City—the subway, the meatpacking district, Coney Island, and Times Square.
Museum curators write: “Like that of Rimbaud, Wojnarowicz’s early life was characterized with alienation from society and family, with a period of living on the streets, a young person dealing with being gay in an overtly hostile environment…. Considered on their own, these four photographs are at once, paradoxically, documentary evidence and narrative set up; they record a life both vividly imagined and intensely lived.”
The museum also owns Peter Hujar’s 1981 portrait David Wojnarowicz, in which museum curators find “proof of Wojnarowicz’s trust in Hujar, this unflinching view into another person’s mind and spirit is typical of Hujar’s singular, even unrelenting, focus. Both Hujar and Wojnarowicz died of complications from AIDS, making this work all the more retrospectively powerful in its recording of a central figure from a downtown New York art milieu that has since vanished.”
Dallas Museum of Art
1717 North Harwood
Dallas, Texas 75201
