During his first trip to France in 1978, David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) was keen to immerse himself in the Parisian environs where a century earlier poet Arthur Rimbaud had tried to live as a runaway teenager in the 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.

Upon his return to New York, Wojnarowicz was able to put in perspective the situation of decay and economic depression that brought the city to the brink of collapse, intuitively connecting it with the state of anarchy that took over Paris during the years of the Commune in the early 1870s. 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 New York 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.

Arthur Rimbaud in New York was first exhibited as an artwork at P.P.O.W gallery, in 1990, through a selection of 25 images. In 2004, the series was published by P.P.O.W in collaboration with the Estate of David Wojnarowicz as a set of 44 photographs. In addition, there is an undated portfolio of 32 test prints, previously owned by Wojnarowicz’s partner Tom Rauffenbart. The present exhibition features a selection of images gathered from these three portfolios and the artist’s foundation. Curated by Antonio Sergio Bessa