Untitled, from the Sex Series, 1989

Working in New York City’s East Village during the late 1980s, Wojnarowicz created art that was both intensely political and deeply personal. The Sex Series emerged from an overwhelming sense of loss—of loved ones, of privacy, of emotional and physical stability—that the artist experienced during the AIDS crisis. In this group of photomontages, Wojnarowicz printed negative images of powerful natural and man-made forces, here a tornado and a bridge, and overlaid them with text from newspapers or his own poetry and superimposed circular peepholes that afford glimpses of intimate scenes, such as pornographic vignettes and microscopic blood cells. The Sex Series documents how dominant American culture marginalized homosexuality and the devastation wrought by AIDS, from which the artist succumbed in 1992. Yet in expressing the anxieties that permeated the gay community and making them both personal and universal, Wojnarowicz ensured that his own experiences would not be erased from cultural memory.