Graduate student Georgie Sánchez was invited to participate in one of the events across Manhattan held on September 13-14 celebrating what would have been artist David Wojnarowicz's 70th birthday through readings, film screenings, music, and a candlelit procession.

Wojnarowicz's friends and champions across multiple generations read passages from his life and work, including Sánchez, who read at the “Each and Every Gesture Carries a Reverberation" event held at the Leslie Lohman Museum of Art.

Thirty years after his passing from AIDS-related illness in 1992, Wojnarowicz continues to inspire.  

Sánchez began his reading with a poem called The Virus by Putlizer Prize winner Jericho Brown, followed by text embedded in the large scale painting Americans Can’t Deal With Death, completed 1990.  Three additional large scale works complete the series:  I Feel a Vague Nausea, We Are Born Into a Preinvented Existence, and He Kept Following Me. 

“'My rage is really about the fact that when I was told that I’d contracted this virus it didn’t take me long to realize that I’d contracted a diseased society as well.' David Wojnarowicz' words from 1989 hold true, still, today,” said Sánchez. "His writings on our 'diseased society’, on our deceptive, pre-invented contemporary world guides part of my pre-dissertation research here at Princeton. I am drawn to David’s political urgency. We are reductively forced to accept, every day, an all you can eat or order online buffet of a homogenized world. That is, until we decide that there is another way to live."

P·P·O·W gallery and the Wojnarowicz Foundation, who planned the commemoration, call Wojnarowicz “among the most incisive and prolific American artists of the 1980s and 90s."