David Wojnarowicz
Untitled (One Day This Kid….)
1990
Photostat
edition of 10
The work included in this exhibition is a 4 x 6 feet vinyl reproduction of the original
Courtesy of The Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W Gallery, New York

September 14, 1954 – July 22, 1992) was a painter, photographer,writer, filmmaker, performance artist, and activist who was prominent in the New York City art world of the 1980s.  Wojnarowicz was born in Red Bank, New Jersey, and later lived with his mother in New York City, where he attended the High School of Performing Arts for a brief period. From 1970 until 1973, after dropping out of school, he for a time lived on the streets of New York City prostituting himself and also worked as a farmer on the Canadian border.

Upon returning to New York City, he saw a particularly prolific period for his artwork from the late 1970s through the 1980s. During this period, he made super-8 films, such as Heroin, began a photographic series of Arthur Rimbaud, did stencil work, played in a band called 3 Teens Kill 4, and exhibited his work in well-known East Village galleries. Wojnarowicz is also connected to other prolific artists of the time, appearing in or collaborating on works with artists like Nan Goldin, Peter Hujar, Luis Frangella, Kiki Smith, Richard Kern, James Romberger, Ben Neill and Phil Zwickler.

In 1985, he was included in the Whitney Biennial, the so-called Graffiti Show. In the 1990s, he fought and successfully issued an injunction against Donald Wildmon and the American Family Association on the grounds that Wojnarowicz’s work had been copied and distorted in violation of the New York Artists’ Authorship Rights Act. Wojnarowicz’ successful lawsuit represented a notable and affirmative step towards artists rights in the United States^.

Wojnarowicz died of AIDS-related complications on July 22, 1992 at the age of 37.  His personal papers are part of the Downtown Collection held by the Fales Library at New York University.

His works include: Untitled (One Day This Kid…); Untitled (Buffalo); Water; Birth of Language II; Untitled (Shark), Untitled (Peter Hujar); Tuna; Peter Hujar Dreaming/Yukio Mishima: St. Sebastian; Delta Towels; True Myth (Domino Sugar); Something From Sleep II; Untitled (Face in Dirt); and I Feel a Vague Nausea among others.

After his death, photographer and artist Zoe Leonard, who was a friend of Wojnarowicz, exhibited a work inspired by him, entitled Strange Fruit (for David).

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Nancy VanDevender is an installation artist who uses space as a platform for mixing politics, theatre, and design. Through a sculptural practice, physical ornamentation and digital illusion are handled as both flattened historical venue and projected politicized stage.  The collection, alteration, and arrangement of tattoos provide interior displays of presumed relationships and shared cultures.

Read about some of the sources for VanDevender’s wallpaper project for Sex Drive and about other research efforts that supported this project.

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One’s life sometimes collides with moments in history, causing it to be altered dramatically by external change. Certainly this was so for Clarissa Thompson Sligh. When she was 15 years old she became the lead plaintiff in the 1955 school desegregation case in Virginia (Clarissa Thompson et. al. vs. Arlington County School Board). From that moment forward, her work as a student and as a professional – first in math/science working for NASA, later in business, and finally, in the arts – has taken into account change, transformation, and complication: themes that related to her experiences fostering social justice.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s Sligh wove together the personal and the political in text-based installations, alternative photographs and artists’ books. She has combined photographs, drawings, text, personal stories and social justice issues to open up conversations on contestable themes.  Stuart Hall writes in Different: A Historical Context. “…Reading the family album is represented by the complex, in many ways extraordinary, body of work by Clarissa Sligh… In returning to re-investigate and re-evaluate her family experiences, she chose to adopt the eye, the language, the texts and formal ‘naivety’ of childhood.”

According to Debra Singer, “Reading Dick and Jane With Me contains at least three levels of signification that run throughout the work, the typed text and sketch drawings, the hand-written words, and then the ‘loosely-rendered figure of a young girl’, as a ‘witness figure’.”

Sligh’s early work, in the 1980s, gained her recognition as an artist who unflinchingly explored ideas that often challenged traditional values.  In 2004, she completed a limited edition artist book, Wrongly Bodied Two, during an artist residency fellowship at the Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, New York. In the book’s narrative, Deborah’s transformation to Jake runs parallel to the story of William and Ellen Craft, two slaves that journeyed to freedom while Ellen passed as a white male. The texts and images contemplate the relationships between liberation, transformation, perception, authenticity, performance and truth. Of this work that began as “Jake in Transition”, Carla Williams wrote in Contact Sheet, “What the viewer ultimately discovers through Sligh’s work is that the photographs aren’t so much about the process of changing genders…but of coming to terms with difference. His and ours.”

In the visitor’s handout for the Second Woodmere Triennial of Contemporary Photography in 2006, curator W. Douglas Paschall writes:

Sometimes art tackles subjects we as a community or culture need to address, subjects that can find no comparable expression through any other means, subjects that might disturb us but that we have to understand more fully if we are to move forward …one series was chosen [of Clarissa Sligh’s work] for the depth of its inquiry and for the insightfulness of that inquiry’s pursuit and evocation. Jake in Transition treats a difficult subject, a controversial subject, a subject we all might benefit from comprehending better in all its dimensions.  [Sligh] asks us to have compassion, simple human compassion, for an… epic journey to a personal freedom.”

Sligh’s work continues to illustrate the power of art to transform a life.

A recipient of awards and fellowships including the Leeway Foundation’s Art and Change Grant (2006), Anonymous Was a Woman (2001), Andrea Frank Foundation (2000), and National Endowment for the Arts (1988), Sligh has also received multiple grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts.  She was the recipient of the Annual Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography in1995 for the use of photography with other media, and the Annual President’s Award from the National Women’s Caucus for Art in 1994.

Additional artists’ books include Voyage(r): A Tourist Map to Japan, Reading Dick and Jane With Me, and What’s Happening With Momma?.

In 2001, Sligh’s installation of photographs and video, Jake In Transition From Female to Male first opened at Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, New York, and later traveled to the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point and Woodland Pattern, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The project continues to travel to universities throughout the United States.  Her most recent work will show at the Holter Museum of Art in Helena, Montana as part of an exhibition entitled Speaking Volumes:  Transforming Hate opening January 25, 2008. Montana Human Rights Network initiated the project, and asked Sligh to respond to hate literature donated by a defecting member of a white supremacist group.  The resulting piece transforms the pages of these books into a monument of peace and reconciliation in the form of over 700 hand-folded cranes.  Hope is a hanging mobile strung between glass beads and measuring 5 feet in length.

Sligh was born in Washington, D.C., grew up in Arlington, Virginia, lived in Manhattan for 30 years and now resides in the mountains of Asheville, North Carolina. She has taught at New York University, the School of Visual Art and the University of Pennsylvania.

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Andres Serrano (born August 15, 1950 in New York City) is an American photographer and artist who has become most notorious through his photos of corpses, as well as his controversial work “Piss Christ”, a red-tinged photograph of a crucifix submerged in a glass container of what was purported to be the artist’s own urine.

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Mira Schor is a New York-based artist and writer noted for her advocacy of painting in a post-medium visual culture and for her contributions to feminist art history.

Schor’s work balances political and theoretical concerns with formalist and material passions. Her work has included major periods in which gendered narrative and representation of the body have been featured, in other periods the focus of her work has been representation of language in drawing and paintings. In both painting and writing, Schor’s areas of interest include the gendered production of art history, the analysis and praxis of painting in post-modern culture, and the relationship between political and conceptual concerns with the materiality of expression. In recent paintings, Schor moves beyond language to the depiction of the form of broken political and painterly thought and continues her interest in narrativity.

Schor received her MFA in painting from CalArts in 1973. She is the recipient of awards in painting from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Marie Walsh Sharpe, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundations and of the CAA’s Frank Jewett Mather Award in Art Criticism.
Schor has had solo exhibitions in New York City at Momenta Art, Edward Thorp Gallery, and Horodner Romley Gallery, and her work has been included in exhibitions at the Santa Monica Museum, the Armand Hammer Museum, P.S.1, the Neuberger Museum, and the Aldrich Museum. She is represented by CB1 Gallery in Los Angeles.

Schor is the author of A Decade of Negative Thinking: Essays on Art, Politics, and Daily Life and Wet: On Painting, Feminism, and Art Culture, editor of The Extreme of the Middle: Writings of Jack Tworkov, and co-editor of M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings, Theory, and Criticism. She is an Associate Teaching Professor in the MFA Fine Arts Program at Parsons The New School For Design.

In January 2010, Schor was awarded a Creative Capital / Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant to develop A Year of Positive Thinking, a blog which includes writings on contemporary art and culture to accompany and provide a positive counterpoint to the publication of her book A Decade of Negative Thinking: Essays on Art, Politics, and Daily Life.

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Forest McMullin works as a commercial and fine art photographer in Atlanta, Georgia. A graduate of the Rochester Institute of Technology, McMullin’s fine art work has been included in numerous group and solo exhibitions in the United States. Among his many exhibition credits, McMullin’s work has been seen at the Hudson River Museum Yonkers, NY; Light Work Gallery in Syracuse, NY; the Houston Center for Photography in Houston, TX; and the George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography in Rochester, NY. McMullin’s work is also widely collected by individuals and institutions. Among the many collections featuring his work are the George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography in Rochester, NY and the American Society of Media Photographers in Philadelphia, PA.

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Christopher Makos was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, grew up in California, and moved to New York after high school. He studied architecture in Paris and briefly worked as an apprentice to Man Ray. Andy Warhol, Makos’ good friend and frequent portrait subject, called Makos “the most modern photographer in America.” His photographs have been exhibited in galleries and museums such as the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, the Tate Modern in London, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the IVAM in Valencia (Spain) and the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid. His pictures have appeared in magazines and newspapers, including Paris Match and Wall Street Journal. He is the author of several important books, like the volumes Warhol/Makos In Context (2007), Andy Warhol China 1982 (2007) and Christopher Makos Polaroids (2009).

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