David Wojnarowicz
Winner of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award (1991) and a staple of the East Village art scene of the 1980s, David Wojnarowicz built an influential, though tragically brief, career around films, painting, photographs, and performance pieces laden with the Catholic iconography of his boyhood and concerned with themes like homosexuality, marginality, difference, and death. He exhibited regularly with the PPOW gallery during his lifetime, and his work has been shown at MoMA and the Whitney Museum. He died of AIDS in 1992.