David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night

The sole survey of Wojnarowicz’s work during his lifetime, David Wojnarowicz: Tongues of Flame, was held in 1990 at Illinois State University in Normal. In the lead-up to the exhibition, he began work on the four large-scale paintings of exotic flowers. Equating the beauty of the body with its very fragility, Wojnarowicz uses the flower as an allusion to the AIDS crisis, his own illness, and a continuum of loss. Importantly, the flower also suggests the possibility and necessity of beauty. The artist Zoe Leonard recalls showing Wojnarowicz, at the height of the AIDS crisis, her small work prints of clouds. Leonard, also an activist, recalls: “I felt guilty and torn. I felt detached—my work was so subtle and abstract, so apolitical on the surface. I remember showing those pictures to David and talking things over with him and he said—I’m paraphrasing—Don’t ever give up beauty. We’re fighting so that we can have things like this, so that we can have beauty again.”