David Wojnarowicz was an accomplished artist, writer, and activist, born September 14, 1954. He came to prominence in New York in the 1980s, part of a cohort of East Village artists including Nan Goldin, Kiki Smith, and Peter Hujar. His work—from the graffiti that first brought him recognition in his teens to the photography and films produced before his  AIDS-related death at the age of thirty-seven—center his experience on the margins of American society.  His multi-media artworks and political advocacy were the focus of a Whitney retrospective, which named both as signs of  his “radical possibility.”