“Hey, there’s some kind of painting there on that wall!” The Kentucky architect Moseley Putney remembers the precise moment in September 2022 when a carpenter on the job at the Billy Goat mixed-use development in Louisville called him over to inspect the glimpses of color underneath the drywall in one of the ground-floor spaces. Putney was instantly transported to another era. It was 1985, and he had just graduated from architecture school and moved back to the city. He was “absolutely smitten” with a German woman who worked for a contact lens company in the area and whose boss had improbably organized a fundraising art exhibition for child abuse prevention. They attended the opening night together, in a part of downtown Louisville that’s now much pricier and rebranded as NuLu.
“It all came back to me,” Putney told Hyperallergic in a phone call. That’s when he realized that the brick-walled space he was renovating, slated for a gym, still held the mural by artist and activist David Wojnarowicz that he had seen nearly four decades earlier, just days after it was painted.
“So I grabbed the hammer and I popped a hole in the drywall and ripped enough out with my hands that I could get my cell phone under and put the flashlight on it. And there it was,” Putney said. “It was like looking into a freakin’ tomb.”
The building, once home to the Kentucky Lithography Company, was converted into residential apartments in 1986. Its owners at the time, apparently aware of the mural’s significance, erected a stud wall over it that maintained the integrity of the work, so that what Putney uncovered was remarkably intact. The paintings of a burning house, a gagging cow, slit-open animal carcasses, and a receding planet Earth, all drawn from Wojnarowicz’s politically charged visual lexicon, are well-documented, discussed in Cynthia Carr’s 2012 biography Fire in the Belly and elsewhere. That the work survived, however, was news to the David Wojnarowicz Foundation and P·P·O·W, the New York gallery that manages the artist’s estate. Over the last three years, they have tried to engage the property’s current owner, the real estate developer Zyyo, in conversations to not only preserve the mural, but also make it accessible to the public.
Today, the work is still standing, and — as of last week — once more out of sight, hidden behind a fresh layer of sheetrock at 600 East Main Street. The stewards of Wojnarowicz’s legacy, for whom the mural is a literal and symbolic testament to the artist’s enduring resonance, are hopeful that the work can see the light of day again.
The Missing Children Show, organized by the late artist, gallerist, vision care executive, and all-around Renaissance man Potter Coe, opened on December 6, 1985. Compelled in part by the case of 12-year-old Ann Gotlib, who had disappeared from a Louisville mall in broad daylight two years earlier and whose presumed kidnapping continued to make local news headlines, Poe was inspired to mount an exhibition in the name of children’s rights. Admission to the show was free, but proceeds from donations encouraged at the door would benefit the Kentucky Child Victims’ Trust Fund.
The six artists invited to participate — Wojnarowicz, Rich Colicchio, Kiely Jenkins, Judy Glantzman, Rhonda Zwillinger, and Leonard Hilton McGurr, then known by his graffiti moniker Futura 2000 — were all working in New York at the time, specifically in the East Village. Coe chose the 8,000-square-foot first floor of the empty lithography building as a venue for his show in part because it reminded him of the alternative urban structures being repurposed for art in the city, like Wojnarowicz and Mike Bidlo’s collaborative experiments in the decaying piers along the Hudson River. In keeping with this spirit, Coe asked the artists to create original works in situ.
Wojnarowicz, who died at the age of 37 from AIDS-related complications, is known for parlaying painting, photography, performance, and protest art into both moving reflections and urgent confrontations of injustice and inequality. He painted the Missing Children mural two years before his HIV diagnosis; before the passing of his mentor and companion Peter Hujar, which thrust Wojnarowicz into an existential reckoning with mortality and meaning; and before he turned to activism to denounce government inaction in the face of the epidemic, showing up to a 1988 ACT UP demonstration wearing a denim jacket emblazoned with an immortal message: “IF I DIE OF AIDS — FORGET BURIAL — JUST DROP MY BODY ON THE STEPS OF THE FDA.” It is because of the poignancy of his art and advocacy against AIDS stigma and homophobia that this is what he is often remembered for. But as a wealth of exhibitions, books, essays, and oral histories testify, Wojnarowicz also chronicled the East Village’s underground art scene and played in a punk band (3 Teens Kill 4, named after a New York Post headline); his works addressed loss, love, spirituality, and childhood, as in the iconic “Untitled (One Day This Kid)” (1990–91), a black-and-white portrait of the young artist as a boy surrounded by a scathing written rebuke of systemic homophobia in America.
Wendy Olsoff, who co-founded P·P·O·W in the early days of the East Village gallery boom in 1983, told Hyperallergic that the themes of the Missing Children exhibition would have resonated with Wojnarowicz’s own life experience.
“I think it must have been close to his heart, because trauma and abuse in childhood were something he knew intimately,” Olsoff said. The artist escaped from a violent home in New Jersey and was unhoused as a teenager, and many of his works center on shattering traditional domestic ideals. In 1985, the same year he participated in Coe’s show, he collaborated with Richard Kern on the 11-minute short film You Killed Me First, in which Wojnarowicz portrays a character based on his own alcoholic father. The piece was later shown at Manhattan’s Ground Zero Gallery in an installation featuring a family dinner scene with bloodied skeletons seated around the table.
For Missing Children, Wojnarowicz similarly set up props around the murals, including a baby doll, a children’s baseball jacket, and a skeleton hanging above a black chair, in what an article in the Louisville Courier Journal described as a “macabre representation of child-snatching.” More accurately, this motley tableau reflected the artist’s approach of distilling personal trauma into a distinct iconography. The mural depicted motifs that recurred throughout his oeuvre, like the burning house, a symbol of defiance that critic Lucy Lippard called “his first artistic trademark,” and the gagging cow, which he rendered on Pier 34 and even on the Berlin Wall. They were ways of lending shape to buried memories, perhaps, or lending agency to those who are voiceless. “David was an artist of incredible integrity,” Glantzman said in an interview with Hyperallergic in 2019. “He was somebody who had no choice but to speak.”
It was implicit that the works in the Missing Children exhibition would be ephemeral, made to be on view for the show’s five-day run, and for the most part that was the case. Except for Wojnarowicz’s.
“I don’t use the word ‘miracle’ lightly,” Anita Vitale, board chair of the Wojnarowicz Foundation, said in a phone call. “But it really wasn’t meant to last. It was in an old, abandoned warehouse, and who knew what would happen to that?”
She was connected to Putney — whom she calls the mural’s “godfather” — after he got in touch with Glantzman, a friend of Wojnarowicz’s whose work was also in the Missing Children Show (the pair became closer in Louisville, while they drove around together in a borrowed 1950 Chevy, according to Carr’s biography). In May 2023, Vitale visited the site along with Glantzman and Isaac Alpert, P·P·O·W’s director of estates. Vitale said she sensed from the start that Zyyo, the developer, viewed the paintings on the wall of its to-be fitness center more as an inconvenience than as a scintillating art historical revelation. The mural was made on a load-bearing structural wall; removing it entirely was out of the question.
“They said, ‘We wish you could take them away.’ I mean, I also wished I could take them away, but they’re painted directly on the brick wall,” Vitale said. “There was no way that in this landmarked building we could start removing brick by brick.”
Other options were floated: encasing the mural in plexiglass, or installing a railing, and providing limited public access to the site for a few days a year. The Speed Museum, a few miles south, found a photographer to document the work and helped research contractors, Vitale said. During this period, she noted, Zyyo maintained contact and approved a site visit for a contractor plexi case assessment. But these were like “little crumbs,” Vitale continued. “It was clear that they did not want the public coming in to view these murals.” Ultimately, the company decided to put the drywall back up, with a six-inch air gap so that the work is not flush with the wall — untouched, yet unseen.
“It was an interesting display of what happens when you have developers on one side and a foundation on the other,” Alpert told Hyperallergic. “To me, I was like, ‘Oh my God, why wouldn’t everyone be doing back flips [to show the mural]?’ But it’s a reminder of what it means to preserve someone’s legacy and educate people about what that entails.”
In a call with Hyperallergic, Jamie Campisano, chief creative director at Zyyo, said the company was “between a rock and a hard place.” The property is privately owned, she emphasized, so the gym operator leasing the space, Zero-Sum, would have to provide public access. Having the mural exposed, Campisano added, would also interfere with the vision for a “cardio room,” which includes mirrors, treadmills, and TV screens. (Hyperallergic attempted to reach Zero-Sum for comment.) There are no alternative sites for the fitness center on the property, she said.
“We want to respect our tenants that are leasing the space, and what they would like the space to be, but we also want to respect the foundation’s wishes of protecting the mural, which is what we did,” Campisano said.
“We understand that we are obligated to protect it, and we want to have it protected,” she continued. “We care about the foundation. But we know that we are not under any obligation to display [the work].”
In 1990, the Visual Artists Rights Act (VARA) established legal protections to prevent artworks from being altered, damaged, or destroyed. Under certain conditions, art created before 1990 may also qualify for these safeguards. But VARA does not necessarily stipulate that a work must be publicly displayed. In one known case, Samuel Kerson sued Vermont Law School after it installed acoustic panels to conceal his two 8-by-24-foot murals about the history of slavery, which visitors found offensive for their inclusion of stereotypical racist depictions. Kerson argued that the school had violated his VARA rights by modifying the presentation of the works. In part because the school’s decision to cover the artworks “neither modifies nor destroys them,” however, the court ruled in favor of the Vermont institution.
With regard to the work’s material preservation, Olsoff said she is unsure whether the current covering on Wojnarowicz’s mural would protect it from damage, such as from leaks or mold. (Hyperallergic emailed Zyyo to ask whether the company conducted a conservation assessment before concealing the work.) But she also thinks of the decision not to display the work as a broader question of ethics, of accountability to a past at risk of erasure, values that often run counter to commercial interests.
“The impetus for them is to have a functioning gym and a building that’s economically profitable for them,” Olsoff said. “Of course, this mural is not conducive to working out, looking at dead meat or a screaming cow — I’d like to work out while looking at David’s mural, but I don’t think the average person would find it inspiring to jog to.”
Zyyo claimed that it was not aware of the mural when it purchased the property, and both Olsoff and Vidale said they recognized the unanticipated weight of such a discovery. But faced with the knowledge of the work’s existence, the company was confronted with a decision, and, in Olsoff’s words, “a responsibility.”
“I don’t think these people are censoring him, but they’re definitely silencing him,” she said.
Wojnarowicz’s work was subject to censorship during his lifetime, amid an emboldened resurgence of conservatism under Reagan, and long after. That one of his murals has resurfaced in another period of political polarization and threats to LGBTQ+ rights and artistic expression is a reminder of the continued discomfort with the truths that his art laid bare.
“There is an energy in that room, there’s a history that is palpable,” Olsoff said. “And they can bury that under sheetrock, but it’s still there, and it’s not going away.”