David Wojnarowicz

History Keeps Me Awake at Night is the catalogue of the Whitney Museum's 2018 David Wojnarowicz retrospective. It is the first comprehensive account of an artist who worked across painting, photography, installation, performance, and writing.

David Breslin's overview essay traces the full range of Wojnarowicz's practice and influences, moving beyond the biographical framing that had dominated earlier scholarship on the artist to weigh his paintings, photographs, installations, performances, and writing on their own terms. David Kiehl contributes close readings of individual bodies of work and the conditions under which they were made, and essays by Julie Ault, Gregg Bordowitz, C. Carr, Marvin Taylor, and Hanya Yanagihara examine his art alongside AIDS-era cultural activism, pushing past the shorthand labels, East Village, queer, postmodern, neo-expressionist, that have followed his reputation. Yale University Press published the 381-page quarto hardcover in 2018 for the Whitney exhibition (July 13-September 30, 2018), which traveled to Mudam Luxembourg in 2019-2020.

Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) emerged from New York's East Village gallery scene in the early 1980s. There he built an expansive, politically charged body of work that intersected directly with the AIDS crisis that eventually killed him. His writing, including Close to the Knives, and his visual work remain central reference points for art made in response to the epidemic.