David Wojnarowicz: Arthur Rimbaud in New York
On view through January 18, 2026
Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art
New York, New York
www.leslielohman.org
Curated by Antonio Sergio Bessa, this exhibition highlights the nineteenth-century French poet Arthur Rimbaud’s impact on David Wojnarowicz. Images in the series were originally produced between 1978 and 1979, and made public through the weekly publication SOHO News in 1982.
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.
Find out more here: https://leslielohman.org/exhibitions/david-wojnarowicz
[Image: David Wojnarowicz, Arthur Rimbaud in New York (Smoking), 1980, gelatin silver print, 5×7 inches, collection of Shelley Fox Aarons and Philip Aarons.]
