Tommy’s Illness/Mexico City, 1987.
“Mexican Diaries,” an exhibition of David Wojnarowicz paintings, took place at Ground Zero gallery in the East Village in 1987.
The images exhibited—reflecting David’s frequent exploration of Mexico—included Evolution, Portrait of Bishop Landa, Mexican Crucifix, Street Kid and Tommy’s Illness.
Learn more about the work in David’s Mexican Diaries show below— thanks to Anthony M. Sennett, David Wojnarowicz Fellow of Fall 2023.
Invitation to David Wojnarowicz, Mexican Diaries exhibit, Ground Zero, January 1987
Shown in January of 1987, David’s Mexican Diaries exhibit was a reflection of his extended time spent across the border. Taking shape primarily on painted canvases, his signature unrestrained palette and collage style were used to depict new iconography foreign to his New York lexicon. His core mission remained, using his new perspective to continue his fight against silencing and suppression.
Despite ads in The East Village Eye and Artforum, posters wheatpasted throughout the neighborhood, and a review in Art in America by Paul Smith, nothing sold and the show went missing from David’s resume until recently.
Driving down long stretches of Mexican road, David believed his surroundings indicative of what the future held for New York. Proclaiming it ‘a day of diamond rings on lifeless fingers,’ he was confronted with parallels to the blatant neglect of the poor he witnessed everyday at home. Returning to the city, he amassed his complex emotions on class strife into the eclectic 1988 Mexican Diaries show.
Marguerite Van Cook and James Romberger’s gallery, Ground Zero, originated from a belief that “…we were at the epicenter of something that was both destructive and productive: New York.” Two years after Carlo McCormick’s October 1985 article “East Village, R.I.P.,” in The East Village Eye mourning the East Village art scene, they encouraged David to create Mexican Diaries.
Returning to the images David couldn’t shake from his travels, he painted an isolated scene of an organ grinder monkey in his oil painting Evolution. Peter Hujar would go on to declare his favorite work. This simplicity, however, would not hold, as he continued to dissect foreign imagery with Portrait of Bishop Landa. In power during the 16th century, Bishop Landa wreaked havoc on history, attempting to erase pre-Columbian Mayan history through violence on his citizens and the burning of more than 20,000 Mayan cult images. Assuming the face of Jesus, Landa took the guise of divinity. Depicting this mask with detailed contours, it greatly overpowers the flattened Mayan imagery surrounding him. Including scenes of dissection and destruction, the work is unabashed in fighting against erasure and censorship.
This thematic thread tangles into Mexican Crucifix, which expanded into five separate canvases. Flanked by depictions of Jesus and the Aztec earth goddess Caotlicue, David painted a crying child with a speeding locomotive and a mummified body amidst pesos and news articles. The stark contrast between innocence, mortality, and technology create a complex picture of religious control and capitalistic corruption.
He continued to use his signature collaging with Street Kid, layering wanted posters and news of death alongside wrestlers and mermaids. Including a close up of a bandaged hand grasping at pesos, it strikes a relationship to David’s own homeless adolescence. While the painting never sold, Romberger recalls rediscovering it in a completely different form at the back of Gracie’s Mansion gallery. At some point in the preceding three years, David had painted vines across the canvas, giving it a second life.
In a show ripe with imagery foreign to David’s traditional motifs, Tommy’s Illness directly depicts his New York collaborator. Having joined David in Mexico, Turner was attempting to recover from withdrawal. Embellishing the canvas with the Virgin Mary on a platter, a sinister cactus, and name-brand horror icons such as Frankenstein, David illuminates the internal suffering of his friend, no matter how serene his exterior may rest. Initially depicted with a “horrible little Mexican puppet” stuck on top of the canvas, this addition has never been recreated.
Despite the brevity of his time in Mexico, David was able to forge universal connections to the culture and delve deeper into his own past, the strife of his New York community, and the dire trajectory of his own country. Despite the neglect it received at its debut and the ease with which it fell into obscurity, David’s visceral ruminations burn just as hotly today.
—Anthony M. Sennett, David Wojnarowicz Fellow, Fall 2023
