RIMBAUD IN NEW YORK - David Wojnarowicz Foundation + Adam's Nest
We are thrilled to be working again this season with the David Wojnarowicz Foundation. In anticipation of an upcoming show at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art we have worked together to create this graphic t-shirt featuring the paper mask bearing the visage of Arthur Rimbaud that was worn in the series of photographs created in 1978-1979.
What follows is a press release about the upcoming show and information about the photographic series.
DAVID WOJNAROWICZ—ARTHUR RIMBAUD IN NEW YORK
October 1, 2025 - Jan 18, 2026
Organized by Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art
Curated by Antonio Sergio Bessa
NEW YORK, NEW YORK - April 2nd, 2025 - The Leslie-Lohman Museum is proud to present David Wojnarowicz - Arthur Rimbaud in New York, curated by Antonio Sergio Bessa. This is the most comprehensive display of this seminal work, produced between 1978 and 1979, and originally made public through the weekly publication SOHO News in 1982. In addition to the Rimbaud series, a selection of archival materials and ephemera will be on view, including the artist’s xerox copy of Sounds in the Distance and the typescript written by Brian Butterick as a foreword which was never released in print. The exhibition will be accompanied by an amply illustrated 250-page catalog produced in collaboration with SKIRA, Milan, featuring an introductory essay by Bessa setting the Rimbaud in New York series in the context of works that crossover different disciplines including literature, photography, and performance; and additional essays by Nicholas Martin on the importance of Rimbaud to the emerging counterculture scene in New York in the 1970s; Marguerite Van Cook’s personal account of her friendship with Wojnarowicz in the developing Lower East Side gallery and club scene; Craig Dworkin’s scholarly incursion into the topic of “the poet on strike,” as it relates to both Rimbaud’s and Wojnarowicz attraction to the boheme; Anna Vitale’s exploration on the significance of the Rimbaud mask; Fiona Anderson’s close reading of Wojnarowicz journals; and Stamatina Gregory’s interview with Allen Frame and Kristin Bates about their historial productions of Wojnarowicz’s monologues in New York and Berlin in the mid-1980s.
In 1978, during his first of many trips to France, the artist David Wojnarowicz immersed himself in the Parisian environs where a century earlier runaway teenager Arthur Rimbaud had done the same in hopes of becoming a poet. Rimbaud’s short and peripatetic youth was memorialized in two volumes of poetry that, in addition to propelling French literature into modernity, have become obligatory reading to young poets across the globe, who, like him, find in poetry a path to transcend the ordinary. Rimbaud – as well as other French authors such as Jean Genet – was an early model for Wojnarowicz, both for his experiments in poetic form, and for his courage in defying the mores of his era.
Upon Wojnarowicz’s return to the United States, he was able to put into historical perspective the situation of decay and economic depression that had spread over New York City starting in the mid-1960’s and ultimately bringing the city to the brink of chaos. He could intuitively make a parallel between the situation that NYC was going through and the state of anarchy that took over Paris during the Commune years. This parallel also allowed him to understand his own
predicament as the child of a disrupted household, having to hone his survivor skills in the streets of the city at a very young age.
Considered in this context, the series of photo-performances that Wojnarowicz produced in collaboration with a small coterie of friends between 1978 and 1979 stands as an important document of the era that not only gives us entry into the artist’s state of mind at a turning point in his life—as he was making a transition from writing onto the visual arts—but that also documents areas of New York City that have been radically transformed.
First exhibited in 1990, David said of the works, quoted by Cynthia Carr in her book Fire in the Belly: “I felt, at that time, that I wanted it to be the last thing I did before I ended up back on the streets or died or disappeared. Over the years, I’ve periodically found myself in situations that felt desperate and, in those moments, I’d feel that I needed to make certain things . . . I had Rimbaud come through a vague biographical outline of what my past had been—the places I had hung out in as a kid, the places I starved in or haunted on some level.” The exhibition David Wojnarowicz: Rimbaud in New York will feature a number of images of the series developed at several moments during the artist's life, as well as posthumously; alongside extensive material from the Wojnarowicz archive at Fales Library—NYU. While the exhibition will focus specifically on the work of David Wojnarowicz, in the broader context it will also examine the socio-cultural and economic conditions during the decades that the artist was most active, and that gave rise to significant countercultural and activist movements.
- Antonio Sergio Bessa
ABOUT THE SERIES
In 1978 and 1979, David Wojnarowicz took a series of photographs of a man wearing a paper mask bearing the visage of Arthur Rimbaud, the French poet equally known for his fervid verse and dramatic life. Rimbaud was the instantiation, and perhaps the inventor, of the idea of the young gay hustler of genius.
Rimbaud abandoned poetry almost immediately after beginning to write it, disappearing into the European underworld, and leaving behind two indelible volumes of poetry, all of it composed before he was 20 years old. Wojnarowicz was 24 or so when he shot most of the Rimbaud in New York series, and the artist’s identification with the poet was no doubt a matter of wistfulness based on affinity.
The figures are posed, on the fly and in verité style, in various situations of public and semi-private urban life, mostly in New York, though a few of the earlier ones are set in Paris. They represent a very specific moment in history, a brief period of both innocence and raunch—the city after Stonewall but before AIDS, a wonderland of sex and drugs, of art and love, of material poverty and overwhelming emotional richness. That was the world Wojnarowicz was formed in, and, as we know too well, it was followed by an era almost the opposite in every regard, years when Manhattan became dominated by money and death, a sleek wealthy city rising, while an entire generation of gay men, drug users, and others were being buried. The negatives and photographs have been stored in Wojnarowicz’ archives at NYU since his death in 1992.
Source photo: Andreas Sterzing, “David Wojnarowicz (Sofa & Painting)” (1983) (© Andreas Sterzing; courtesy the artist; Estate of David Wojnarowicz; and P·P·O·W, New York)
