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Announcing The David Wojnarowicz Foundation -  - News - PPOW

David Wojnarowicz with Tom Warren, Self-Portrait of David Wojnarowicz, 1983-84, acrylic and collaged paper on gelatin silver print

Announcing The David Wojnarowicz Foundation

P·P·O·W is proud to introduce The David Wojnarowicz Foundation. In the 30 years since his life was cut short, the voice of David Wojnarowicz has continued to resonate in museums, galleries, classrooms, protests, and visual celebrations of beauty and defiance and love. The Foundation's work begins with the launch of a dynamic website celebrating David's work and legacy. We welcome you in exploring this growing resource and beginning a relationship with the Foundation and its mission in the years to come.

As one of its first initiatives, the David Wojnarowicz Foundation, in collaboration with P·P·O·W, created the interactive website, onedaythiskid.com. Please join us today in commemorating the 30th anniversary of David Wojnarowicz's passing with a visual chorus of solidarity and protest.

Created shortly before his death, the original artwork Untitled (One Day This Kid...) features a boyhood image of Wojnarowicz surrounded by his powerful text as follows:

"One day this kid will get larger. One day this kid will come to know something that causes a sensation equivalent to the separation of the earth from its axis. One day this kid will reach a point where he senses a division that isn’t mathematical. One day this kid will feel something stir in his heart and throat and mouth. One day this kid will find something in his mind and body and soul that makes him hungry. One day this kid will do something that causes men who wear the uniforms of priests and rabbis, men who inhabit certain stone buildings, to call for his death. One day politicians will enact legislation against this kid. One day families will give false information down to their children and each child will pass that information down generationally to their families and that information will be designed to make existence intolerable for this kid. One day this kid will begin to experience all this activity in his environment and that activity and information will compel him to commit suicide or submit to danger in hopes of being murdered or submit to silence and invisibility. Or one day this kid will talk. When he begins to talk, men who develop a fear of this kid will attempt to silence him with strangling, fists, prison, suffocation, rape, intimidation, drugging, ropes, guns, laws, menace, roving gangs, bottles, knives, religion, decapitation, and immolation by fire. Doctors will pronounce this kid curable as if his brain were a virus. This kid will lose his constitutional rights against the government’s invasion of his privacy. This kid will be faced with electro-shock, drugs, and conditioning therapies in laboratories tended by psychologists and research scientists. He will be subject to loss of home, civil rights, jobs, and all conceivable freedoms. All this will begin to happen in one or two years when he discovers he desires to place his naked body on the naked body of another boy."

Post your image to social media using the hashtag #OneDayThisKid.