More than 25 years after he died of Aids, one of the most fearless artists is being remembered at four different exhibitions

Artwork made by gay artists has historically been cast aside as such, flagged with labels like “gay art” or “Aids art” or “political art” that serve no discernible purpose other than to tell the viewer that the person who made it is, or was, gay (and often angry). The artist David Wojnarowicz, who died in 1992 from complications related to Aids, has not been especially well-served by such designations, which in the years since his death have imposed on him a martyrdom non-minority artists are seldom asked to bear.

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Wojnarowicz, the writer, painter, photographer, poet, printmaker and activist, was gay himself, and in his work addressed same-sex desire, the Aids crisis, the persecution of sexual minorities and the Reagan administration’s refusal to acknowledge their existence. But his work is really about America, a place he had described in his 1991 essay collection Close to the Knives as an “illusion”, a “killing machine”, a “tribal nation of zombies ... slowly dying beyond our grasp”.

But now America, or at least its art world establishment, is ready, a quarter-century after his death, to acknowledge Wojnarowicz’s rightful place in the canon of contemporary art, not just “gay art”.

History Keeps Me Awake at Night, a full-scale retrospective of Wojnarowicz’s work at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, opens on Friday, coinciding with two other New York exhibitions of the artist’s work and a third launched earlier this summer at the Loewe gallery in Madrid. The retrospective, as many have noted, could not be more timely, arriving in a charged political moment not unlike the one from which Wojnarowicz emerged as a voice of searing honesty. But its origins stretch to 2001, when the Whitney’s curator of prints, David Kiehl, found himself flipping through a Christie’s catalogue only to notice a piece, Wojnarowicz’s Falling Man and Map of USA, that reminded him “of the guy who used to paint on the sidewalks”. It was prescient, too, as the World Trade Center attacks happened just weeks later.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Untitled (Green Head), 1982. Photograph: Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W., New York

“David was always called a gay icon, an Aids icon, but the more I got to thinking about it and looking at his work I realized there is a lot more there,” says Kiehl, who curated the exhibition with David Breslin, director of the collection at the Whitney. “The initial proposal was a show about the Pier [Wojnarowicz’s 1983 show at New York’s Pier 34] but that was the wrong one to do. There had to be a good survey of his works. So when we got the go-ahead to do this show, we really went crazy.”

The retrospective begins in the late 70s, when Wojnarowicz was writing poetry and taking photographs of himself and friends wearing a mask of the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, his kindred spirit. A runaway teen from New Jersey who was abused throughout his childhood, Wojnarowicz was hustling in Times Square before he could drink legally. He began working as a busboy at Danceteria, the popular Hell’s Kitchen nightclub where the pop artist Keith Haring worked, and eventually became a fixture of the East Village’s fertile, romantically dysfunctional art scene, peopled by contemporaries like Haring, Nan Goldin, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Peter Hujar.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Peter Hujar, as photographed by the artist. Untitled, 1988. Photograph: David Wojnarowicz/The Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York

It was when he met Hujar, Breslin writes in an insightful essay for the exhibition’s catalogue, that Wojnarowicz came to self-identify as an artist. He began to paint, first by stencil and later by hand, and develop a strong visual vocabulary to rival the blistering prose readers recognize from essays like Being Queer in America and In the Shadow of the American Dream. “Hell is a place on Earth,” he wrote in the latter piece, a series of autobiographical dispatches from the frontlines of the Aids epidemic. “Heaven is a place in your head.”

He came to adopt such a view in the crucible of the crisis, as friends and lovers, including Hujar, died of a disease the sitting president refused to even name. Working from a place of rage, generative in art if less so in life, the mid-to-late 80s propelled Wojnarowicz into genius. In epic paintings, mixed media and intricate collage work, he established something of a personal symbology: red strings, connecting apertures in his work, reflected growing cultural schisms; toy soldiers and men on horseback parodied American mythology; wheel discs and pipeline sleeves commented on the industrial revolution and its effects on the environment; and also insects, most famously featured squirming around the corpse of a plastic Jesus in Wojnarowicz’s short film Fire in My Belly, shot on Super 8 film.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A jacket worn by Wojnarowicz at an Aids demonstration in 1988. Photograph: PR Image

The film, which lends its name to Cynthia Carr’s comprehensive 2012 biography of Wojnarowicz, was one of several pieces that sparked the ire of conservative politicians and lobbyists, specifically the Rev Donald Wildmon and Senator Jesse Helms. After Wojnarowicz was awarded a $15,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for a 1990 retrospective at Illinois State University, Wildmon, then the executive director of the American Family Association (AFA), mailed a pamphlet titled Your Tax Dollars Helped Pay for These “Works of Art” to members of Congress.

Wojnarowicz would then file suit, alleging his works – which featured same-sex couples and an image of Christ with a syringe in his arm – had been lifted out of context and misrepresented. Wojnarowicz’s letter to the AFA, as well as the $1 check he was awarded in nominal damages, are both on display at the Whitney.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Death of American Spirituality, 1987. Photograph: Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P·P·O·W Gallery, New York

Kiehl, however, doesn’t see Wojnarowicz as a heretic. For the exhibition catalogue, he wanted to include an essay from a Jesuit about secular Catholicism, a tradition in which he places both Wojnarowicz and Nan Goldin. “They come from a Catholic background, and their work is seen as attacking the church, but underneath it all is a genetic understanding of spirituality, of caring,” he says, noting that the image of Christ shooting up was Wojnarowicz’s commentary on Jesus “taking on the sins of the world”.

He continues: “What would Christ be doing today about our refugees? What would Christ be doing about Betsy DeVos? David was thinking in a way that went beyond this narrow, sectarian view and getting at what it means to be a sentient human being.”

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In the late 1980s, after his diagnosis, Wojnarowicz began to include text in his paintings, which grew more technically proficient and protest-oriented. In one of his last pieces, he paints a wilted flower. Moving closer, though, one notices two black and white images attached by red string to the masonite board: one shows a man in a hazmat suit, the other a rusted cadaver. “Americans can’t deal with death unless they own it,” reads part of the text, lifted from an essay in Close to the Knives.

You’d be hard-pressed to pick a favorite of the pieces shown at the Whitney, but Americans Can’t Deal With Death is as apt a reflection of the Wojnarowicz oeuvre as any. It’s all there – his surreal and unsparing prose; his intellect; his confrontations with both beauty and death – displayed in the bastion of American art. Still, one wonders how Wojnarowicz would react to the retrospective at the Whitney, the epitome of the art world establishment that has been slow to recognize the gravity of his contributions.

“I’m hoping he is up there very happy with what we’ve done,” says Kiehl. “But he is also David, so there’s probably that ‘Fuck you, you rich people’. There were so many sides to him, I don’t think he can ever be pigeonholed into one.”