The Hall Art Foundation is pleased to announce an exhibition by the acclaimed American artist David Wojnarowicz (1954–1992) to be held in Reading, Vermont from 10 May – 30 November 2025.  This show features over fifteen paintings and sculptures made from 1982 to 1990, a period of intense creative energy and output for the artist. A self-proclaimed outsider who was distrustful of all institutional structures and systems, Wojnarowicz’s powerful work was shaped from a private universe of signs and symbols and celebrates those living on the margins of society.

Largely self-taught and deeply influenced by an abusive and displaced childhood, Wojnarowicz came to prominence as a central figure in New York’s East Village art scene in the 1980s.  He created visceral and emotional artworks that span photography, painting, music, film, sculpture, writing, performance art, and activism. Gay, and later diagnosed as HIV-positive, Wojnarowicz became one of the art community’s most passionate and articulate voices at the height of the AIDS crisis, engaging in widely publicized debates over inadequate medical research and funding, censorship in the arts, and politically sanctioned homophobia. Wojnarowicz died of an AIDS-related illness on 22 July 1992 at the age of thirty-seven.

Wojnarowicz had a traumatic childhood and adolescence as the son of a violent and alcoholic father who worked as a merchant seaman on the SS United States. In the large four-panel painting, Dad’s Ship (1984), Wojnarowicz depicts an ocean liner ablaze in flames. Throughout his life, rivers, lakes, and oceans offered Wojnarowicz a sanctuary, and in his work, water is often linked to dreams and myths of emergence, purification and metamorphosis. Dad’s Ship was first presented as part of an installation at New York’s Gracie Mansion Gallery in 1984. It was with this installation that Wojnarowicz first began to address the traumatic events of his childhood in his visual art. The installation also included the burning boy – a child-size mannequin and avatar for Wojnarowicz – collaged with torn up maps and with flames on the backs of his limbs, torso and head running away from the ship on a bed of sand representing the bottom of the sea. Suspended above the boy and in front of the painting was a large fiberglass model of a shark, also covered in map fragments. Untitled (Shark) (1984) – is presented here with Dad’s Ship (1984) for the first time since their original installation. Wojnarowicz often included imagery of animals in his work as signifiers of purity, wisdom and nature – like him, “outsiders” on the periphery of the man-made world. For Wojnarowicz, maps were a metaphor for government and signified the arbitrary nature of manmade borders and other established divisions. By tearing, cutting and reconfiguring them, he expressed the randomness of both man-made borders and the divisions between “civilization” and nature.

Employing a dense and private vocabulary of signs and symbols, Wojnarowicz’s work often used allegory to critique what he saw as corrupt in society. Untitled (1984) is part of a series of disembodied multi-media plaster heads entitled Metamorphosis. Relating these works to the twenty-three chromosomal pairs present in human DNA, Wojnarowicz has described the series as being about “the evolution of consciousness” and illustrating the corruption of nature through what he called the “pre-invented world”. Starting with a painted plaster cast, each head is individualized to represent a different stage of metamorphosis and is marked with various elements representing the man-made world, including torn fragments of geographical maps, dollar bills, and bandages, while the colors of the eyes change “according to what colors mean spiritually”. In the group’s original presentation at New York’s Civilian Warfare Gallery in 1984, Wojnarowicz placed the heads on long shelves mounted to a wall painted with a bull’s-eye. A twenty-fourth head, which was made to look like it had fallen off the shelf, sat on the floor in an old doctor's bag. This exhibition unites eleven heads from the original group – including the twenty-fourth head in a black doctor’s bag.

Retrospectives of Wojnarowicz’s work have been held at the University Galleries of Illinois State University, Normal, IL (1990), the New Museum, New York, NY (1999), and at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, traveling to the Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, and the Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg City (2018-19). A concurrent exhibition of Wojnarowicz’s films and photographs opened at the Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany in 2019. Wojnarowicz: Fuck You Faggot Fucker, a comprehensive feature-length documentary about the artist’s life and work premiered in November 2020. Last year, P·P·O·W and the David Wojnarowicz Foundation mounted a citywide series of programs in celebration of the artist’s would-be 70th birthday, with screenings, performances, and activations taking place at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art; and the NYC AIDS Memorial. His works can be found in institutional collections around the world.

Hall Art Foundation
544 VT Route 106
Reading, VT 05062
United States
 

For more information and images, please contact the Foundation’s administrative office at info@hallartfoundation.org