Public life in America changed with the abduction and murder of six-year-olds Etan Patz in 1979 in New York and Adam Walsh in Florida two years later, after which the world started to seem much more dangerous and hostile to children. In 1984, Congress established the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and at about the same time, the faces of the missing began appearing on milk cartons, accompanied by the plaintive words, “Have you seen me?”
At that very moment, the largely self-taught New York artist David Wojnarowicz was coming into his own, with shows from the East Village to Cologne and Buenos Aires in 1984 and 1985. Also at that moment, he contributed a large, ambitious mural to an exhibition to benefit missing children in the perhaps unlikely setting of Louisville, Kentucky. That mural, which was soon walled over and forgotten about, recently reemerged for over two years—before the building’s owner, over protests by the artist’s advocates, walled it over again in favor of a gym they were installing at a cost of some $250,000.
“The Missing Children Show: 6 Artists from the East Village on Main Street” was organized in 1985 by Louisville art dealer and artist Potter Coe, who also had a presence in New York. Louisville had experienced its own tragedy in 1983, when 12-year-old Ann Gotlib was abducted from a Louisville mall (her disappearance remains unsolved to this day), and donations from visitors to the show would go to the Kentucky Child Victims’ Trust Fund. “It could be the strangest thing people here have ever seen,” Coe told the Louisville Times ahead of the show, which also included Rich Colicchio, Futura 2000, Judy Glantzman, Kiely Jenkins, and Rhonda Zwillinger.
The show took place over an 8,000-square-foot area on the ground floor of at 600 East Main Street, which was then called the Billy Goat Strut building and was previously the Kentucky Lithography Co. building. It ran from December 6–10 in a space heaped with trash and featuring broken windows and bare lightbulbs—the closest thing Coe could find to an abandoned New York building.
Incredibly, a press portfolio for the show survives and was sold online by Gallery 98; it features a lengthy quote from the artist. “I began painting in abandoned spaces as a result of hanging around in the abandoned piers along the Hudson since the age of fifteen,” it reads in part. “What I have always responded to was the sense of wind moving around among the rooms of a place that contained all the energy of the people that once breathed and spoke and lived there.”
A Metaphor for the Plight of the Abducted Child
The Louisville installation, which Wojnarowicz worked on for five cold December days, originally included juvenile paraphernalia like a baby doll and a teddy bear, along with a bright yellow skeleton suspended from the ceiling over a chair with flames painted on it, all forming a commentary on the abduction of children. “The chair is hell,” Wojnarowicz told the Louisville Times. “It’s really a metaphor for the aftermath of that kind of act.”
There’s also a field of cow carcasses, beheaded and cut down their bellies to reveal their ribcages, showing man’s brutality to the natural world. As Wojnarowicz told the reporter, “I use skeletons a lot in my work. I don’t have any morbid sense of curiosity about them, but I like to know what’s inside the body.”
The mural is something like a greatest-hits compilation of the artist’s trademark imagery. A burning house, split down the middle and erupting in black smoke, could have served a clear symbol of his own troubled childhood, and was a metaphor for the destruction of the “nuclear family.” It’s an elaborated version of a similar motif in stenciled format that often appears in his work and served as the logo for his post-punk noise band, 3 Teens Kill 4—No Motive, their name ripped from a New York Post headline.
The gagging cow, tongue extended, is familiar from a 1983 guerrilla exhibition on Pier 34 on New York’s Hudson River, organized by Wojnarowicz and fellow-artist Mike Bidlo; a photo by his onetime lover and lifelong friend, photographer Peter Hujar, captures the artist standing before a wall-sized rendition of the image, which he would also splash on the Berlin Wall.
Hanging above it all in a black void is the Earth itself, recalling the artist’s words: “Ever since my teenage years, I’ve experienced the sensation of seeing myself from miles above the Earth, as if from the clouds.”
A Mural Emerges, Like ‘Tutankhamen’s Tomb’
At the time of the 1985 show, the owners of 600 East Main Street were renovating the building’s upper floors for apartments; the artworks were always meant to be ephemeral, and it was assumed they would be destroyed.
But when the show closed and the other artists took their work back to New York, the owners instead walled the mural over, thus ensuring its preservation—but they made no one aware of the mural’s survival, certainly not real estate developer Zyyo, which owns several buildings in the so-called NuLu (New Louisville) neighborhood, and acquired 600 East Main Street in 2023.
Enter architect Moseley Putney, a lifelong Louisvillian, who happened to be working for Zyyo in 2023 when the Campisano family was rehabbing the space. A worker alerted him to the mural’s presence.
“I go over there and crack open the drywall with a hammer. I kind of went crazy,” Putney recalled in a phone conversation, adding, with a laugh, “I pulled out a chunk of drywall the size of my palm and shined a light back there. It was the Tutankhamen of the art world!
“I had forgotten about it, but I was at the Missing Children Show,” said Putney. “Potter Coe was a good friend of mine.” Coe died in 2024.
The mural may not quite be King Tut’s tomb, but it is inarguably a unique piece with a fascinating story by an artist who was immortalized in an acclaimed 2018 retrospective, “David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night,” at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, which the New York Times T Magazine pronounced “a model for making art out of political anger.” The show traveled to the Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid. Wojnarowicz is represented by one of New York’s most respected galleries, P·P·O·W, founded by Wendy Olsoff and Penny Pilkington.
In addition to the Whitney, the artist’s works appear in museums worldwide, from the Art Institute of Chicago to the Reina Sofía, the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Tate Gallery in London. Included in three Whitney Biennials, he is also revered for his writing and his AIDS activism. Artists like Nayland Blake, Every Ocean Hughes, (formerly known as Emily Roysdon) and Wolfgang Tillmans have drawn inspiration from his art and writings.
A ‘Louisville Treasure’ or a White Elephant?
“Do you realize what we have here? What good news this could be for the company?” Putney recalled telling Zyyo of what he called “a Louisville treasure.” Ann Gotlib’s story, he told me, still can bring Louisvillians to tears. Maybe, Putney suggested, the space could be leased to an art gallery or even become a downtown satellite of the Speed Art Museum, just four miles to the south, either of which could feature the mural as a centerpiece.
“From my point of view it is a miraculous thing to have such a prime example of an artist’s practice in such a large scale,” said the Speed’s contemporary art curator Tyler Blackwell in a phone interview. “The fact that the gagging cow and the burning house, which are such iconic images, are being represented in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1985 is pretty crazy.” Blackwell was recently in conversations with a colleague at the University of Louisville about the possibility of teaching a class around the piece.
Wojnarowicz’s mural is the only trace of the show that remains. That is, in a way, fitting, since the artist was at the core of the show’s concept. Putney shared with me texts from Coe from a few years ago in which he explained that “Little Ann and her story inspired me to tie the concept with Wojnarowicz’s art and life story as an abused youth together.”
The artist’s abusive, alcoholic father tore him away from his teenage mother, sent him to foster homes and Catholic boarding schools, and occasionally terrorized him and his two siblings. When an adolescent Wojnarowicz escaped to Manhattan, he resorted to supporting himself as a hustler, often finding johns at the seedy Hudson River piers. Especially after he contracted HIV, he became a vociferous activist for the cause; the artist, who would have turned 70 this year, died from AIDS-related causes in 1992.
The Campisano family “basically were not interested at all,” said Putney. So he “went rogue” and hunted down artist Glantzman on Instagram, who then contacted the David Wojnarowicz Foundation, established in 2022 and headed up by retired New York social worker Anita Vitale. (Vitale was previously involved, along with several other friends and colleagues, in creating AIDS Quilt panels for Wojnarowicz and his late partner, Tom Rauffenbart.)
“Everyone is totally amazed by the mural—except the family that owns the building,” said Vitale in a phone interview. “There was never an opening for a real discussion about what we would have liked to have done. They said to us very clearly there would be no public access. They didn’t want people coming in and out. They were not at all responsive to anything we raised with them.”
In 2023, the gallery wrote to Zyyo to make the developer aware of the Wojnarowicz Foundation’s rights, as outlined in the 1990 Visual Artists Rights Act (VARA), explaining that Zyyo is responsible for preserving the work for as long as its copyright is in effect, at least until 2042. The work cannot be modified in a way that would damage it, cannot be destroyed through neglect or otherwise, and cannot be removed in any way that would change or damage it, the letter asserted.
Wojnarowicz’s Mural ‘Doesn’t Go with the Vibe’
New York University professor Amy Adler, who specializes in areas including art law and intellectual property law, isn’t entirely sure the work would be protected by VARA.
“VARA protects the work of an artist for the artist’s life in most cases, and prevents modification or destruction of the work,” she said in a phone call. “There are complicated questions about whether Wojnarowicz’s mural would be protected by the statute, but even assuming it is protected, there is the question of whether covering the work amounts to modification or destruction.”
Adler cited two possible precedents. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 2023 that the Vermont Law School could permanently conceal a mural that was deemed to be offensive, despite the artist’s wishes. A New York judge, meanwhile, ruled against a real estate developer who, without notifying the artists, whitewashed murals at the graffiti mecca of 5Pointz in the process of converting the building into condominiums.
“What I would ask the building owner to consider is, putting aside the legal considerations, what about the moral considerations?” Adler added. “Is there a way they can make this work accessible and still make it a usable gym? It’s a significant work of art of an important artist. Is there some way to work this out that accounts for the rights of the owners and the interests of the public and the work of art?”
From the developer’s point of view, they haven’t destroyed the mural, so they’re in the clear. However, photos taken before it was walled over do show duct work running along the upper edge of the mural, which would block part of it from view even if the wall were taken down again. The photos also show workout equipment and benches leaning on or placed directly up against the wall, suggesting less than meticulous care.
“The foundation has been so nice,” said Zyyo’s chief creative director Jamie Campisano in a phone interview, “and we respect their passion, and we have learned so much about David. If we could have given the mural to them on day one, we would have done that in a heartbeat but it is on a structural wall, so there was no way for us to hand it over. It does not go with the aesthetic or the design for the gym, so we were in a bad place. Having a mural of this nature just didn’t go with the health and fitness vibe.” (The company leasing the space for the gym signed the lease in full knowledge of the mural’s presence, she said.)
Vitale gets very different vibes from the situation. She compared the walling-up of the mural to “The Cask of Amontillado,” the 1846 Edgar Allan Poe short story in which the narrator, wanting revenge on a friend for a perceived insult, lures him into the catacombs beneath his estate and entombs him alive.
“A vital, living organism,” said Vitale, “is boarded up.”