Dear Jean Pierre collects David Wojnarowicz’s transatlantic correspondence to his Parisian lover Jean Pierre Delage between 1979 and 1982. Capturing a truly foundational moment for Wojnarowicz’s artistic and literary practice, these letters not only reveal his captivating personality—and its concomitant tenderness, compassion, and neuroses—but also index the development of the visual language that would go on to define him as one of the preeminent artists of his generation.

Through this collection, readers are introduced to Wojnarowicz’s Rimbaud series, the band 3 Teens Kill 4, the publication of his first photographs, his early friendship with Peter Hujar, his participation in the then-emerging East Village art and music scenes, and the preparations for the publication of his first book. Included with these writings are postcards, drawings, xeroxes, photographs, collages, flyers, ephemera, and contact sheets that showcase some of the artist’s iconic images and work, such as the Burning House motif and Untitled (Genet, after Brassai).

Beyond these milestones, the book offers a striking portrayal of Wojnarowicz as a twenty-something, detailing his day-to-day life with the type of unbridled earnestness that comes with that age and the softness of love and longing. This disarming tenderness provides a picture of a young man just beginning to find his voice in the world and the love he has found in it.

Although the two exchanged letters in equal measure, Delage’s correspondences have largely been lost, leaving us with only a revelatory glimpse into the internal world of Wojnarowicz during what turned out to be his formative years.

David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) was born in Red Bank, New Jersey. Wojnarowicz channeled a vast accumulation of raw images, sounds, memories and lived experiences into a powerful voice that was an undeniable presence in the New York City art scene of the 1970s, 80s and early 90s. Through his several volumes of fiction, poetry, memoirs, painting, photography, installation, sculpture, film and performance, Wojnarowicz left a legacy, affirming art’s vivifying power in a society he viewed as alienating and corrosive. His use of blunt semiotics and graphic illustrations exposed what he felt the mainstream repressed: poverty, abuse of power, blind nationalism, greed, homophobia and the devastation of the AIDS epidemic. Wojnarowicz died of AIDS-related complications on July 22, 1992 at the age of 37.

David Wojnarowicz's use of photography, often done in conjunction with writing or painting, was extraordinary--as was his way of addressing the AIDS crisis and issues of censorship and homophobia. Brush Fires in the Social Landscape, begun in collaboration with the artist before his death in 1992 and first published in 1994, engaged what Wojnarowicz would refer to as his tribe or community. Contributors--from artist and writer friends such as Karen Finley, Nan Goldin, Kiki Smith, Vince Aletti, C. Carr and Lucy R. Lippard, to David Cole, the lawyer who represented him in his case against Donald Wildmon and the American Family Association--together offer a compelling, provocative understanding of the artist and his work. Brush Fires is also the only book that features the breadth of Wojnarowicz's work with photography. Now, on the twentieth anniversary of Brush Fires, when interest in the artist's work has increased exponentially, this expanded and redesigned edition of this seminal publication puts the work in front of an audience all over again while maintaining the integrity of the original. Through the lens of various contributors, the book addresses Wojnarowicz's profound legacy: the relentless censorship and ethical issues, alongside his aesthetic brilliance, courage and influence.

David Wojnarowicz’s fractured scrapbook of dream journals, political critique and collage―an ultra-rare document of 1980s New York subculture

David Wojnarowicz’s In the Shadow of Forward Motion was originally published as a photocopied zine/artist’s book to accompany an exhibition of the same name at PPOW Gallery in 1989. Despite its meager print run of just 50 copies, the publication has garnered a legendary status, and for good reason.

In it we find, for the first time, Wojnarowicz’s writing and visual art, two mediums for which he is renowned, playing off each other in equal measure. We glimpse the artist’s now iconic mixed-media works, with motifs of ants, locomotives, money, tornados and dinosaurs, juxtaposed with journal-like texts or “notes towards a frame of reference” that examine historical and global mechanisms of power symbolized through the technology of their times.

Wojnarowicz uses the fractured experience of his day-to-day life (including dreams, which he recorded fastidiously) to expose these technologies as weapons of class, cultural and racial oppression. The artist’s experience living with HIV is a constant subject of the work, used to shed light on the political and social mechanisms perpetuating discrimination against not only himself, but against women and people of color, who faced additional barriers in their efforts to receive treatment for the illness. Rooted in the maelstrom of art, politics, religion and civil rights of the 1980s, the book provides a startling glimpse into an American culture that we have not yet left behind. Félix Guattari provides an introduction.

Painter, photographer, writer, filmmaker, performance artist, songwriter and activist, David Wojnarowicz was born in Redbank, New Jersey, in 1954 and died of AIDS in New York in 1992. The author of five books―most famously Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration―Wojnarowicz attained national prominence as a writer and advocate for AIDS awareness, and for his stance against censorship.