AIDS Quilts for an Artist and His Partner, Sewn During a New Pandemic

Since the fall of 2019, six women, some from the art world, others retired social workers, had labored on two AIDS quilts devoted to the memories of the artist David Wojnarowicz and his partner, Tom Rauffenbart. The women converged from all over New York City on the neighborhood of Washington Heights, at the home of Anita Vitale, who had met Mr. Rauffenbart, a fellow social worker, in the 1980s.

Then, in mid-March, in what you might call a sad cosmic coincidence, their work was interrupted by the arrival on the scene of another pandemic.

Mr. Rauffenbart, who learned he had AIDS before his partner but lived until last year, had always wanted to create a quilt for the artist, who died in 1992. In 2018, when the Whitney Museum of American Art mounted the retrospective “David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night,” he decided it was time, but then became too ill to carry it through. The sewing circle — the arts writer Cynthia Carr, author of the stunning “Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz”; the artists Jean Foos and Judy Glantzman; the retired social worker Virginia Hourigan; the art dealer Gracie Mansion, who showed the artist’s work at her gallery in the ’80s; and Ms. Vitale — have kept hope alive through video chats while locked down at their homes.

Mr. Wojnarowicz (pronounced voy-na-RO-vich), after starting off as a poet, took up other writing formats as well as music, performance and various forms of visual art. His work, which was always political but became furiously so with the arrival of the AIDS epidemic and especially with his own diagnosis in 1988, now resides in institutions from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Tate Gallery in London, and beyond. Ms. Vitale’s walls constitute a veritable Wojnarowicz museum, with iconic works of his and some that have never been exhibited, as well as portraits of the artist by the likes of Nan Goldin and Timothy Greenfield-Sanders. She took over the apartment from Mr. Rauffenbart when he died; if you call and get the voice mail, you still hear his outgoing announcement. It is roomy enough to accommodate dining tables that, leaves inserted, can support the large quilts.

Mr. Wojnarowicz has been featured in no fewer than three Whitney Biennials, and artists like Nayland Blake, Every Ocean Hughes (formerly known as Emily Roysdon) and Wolfgang Tillmans have found his art and writings inspiring. The Whitney Museum’s director of curatorial initiatives, David Breslin, who co-curated “History Keeps Me Awake at Night” with David Kiehl, a curator emeritus, says that a younger generation of queer artists is thinking a lot about those from Mr. Wojnarowicz’s generation, felled by AIDS: “These artists feel like, ‘These would have been my teachers, the ones to create a different model for what I could be and what the art world could be.’” Somewhat inexplicably, none of Mr. Wojnarowicz’s many fans had created a quilt for him.

As one might expect from a crew involving artists, the quilts, on richly textured red cloth (from Mr. Rauffenbart’s own supply of quilting materials, no less), are a worthy tribute, lush and gorgeous. Each is, like all the quilts donated to the AIDS Quilt, an individual piece that will become part of the whole. They will go on view as part of the show “The David Wojnarowicz Correspondence with Jean Pierre Delage, 1979-1982,” tentatively scheduled for 2021 at the New York gallery P.P.O.W; the show is curated by Ms. Carr and the gallery’s Anneliis Beadnell. While the women arrived at a plan for the imagery together, the design was entrusted to Ms. Foos, who collaborated with Mr. Wojnarowicz on one of his best-known pieces, “One Day This Kid (1990).” That work shows a childhood photo of the artist, surrounded by text of his own writing that detailed the sickening bigotry that awaited “this kid” at the hands of what he, in other writings, indicted as “a sick society.”

Center stage in Mr. Wojnarowicz’s design is his 1988-89 painting “Something from Sleep IV (Dream),” in which the plates lining a stegosaurus’s spine spell out his last name. The image of the dinosaur, he wrote, had to do with an anxiety dream in which he saw himself as alien, and alienated from “the forward thrust of civilization.” Reviewing the Whitney show for The Times, Holland Cotter wrote: “From the start, he took outsiderness itself, as defined by ethnicity, gender, economics and sexual orientation, as his true native turf. And from it he attacked — through writing, performing and object-making — all forms of exclusion and oppression.”

Lending resonance to the dinosaur iconography, the artist “saw himself as someone who was about to become extinct,” Ms. Carr said in a phone interview. Lined up below the painting are smaller squares, several devoted to his animal imagery. “He was so gentle with animals,” Ms. Vitale noted in a Zoom chat with the other quilters this spring. Ms. Mansion added, “He was from such an abusive family, he took refuge in the woods.” Ms. Carr’s biography details sadistic torture that the artist’s father heaped upon Mr. Wojnarowicz and his siblings; as a child, he escaped not only to nature, but also to the streets of New York.

Dominating Mr. Rauffenbart’s quilt, meanwhile, is his partner’s 1989 canvas “Something from Sleep III (For Tom Rauffenbart),” which had resided at Mr. Rauffenbart’s apartment for decades before it was exhibited in the artist’s 2018 show. Within the silhouetted figure of Mr. Rauffenbart looking into a microscope, we see a rendering of our solar system, the very cosmos within the frame of the lover. Ms. Vitale remembers Mr. Rauffenbart as a man who could find humor in even challenging situations, and who loved to cook — one photo reproduced in his quilt shows him clowning around with a pot on his head, brandishing serving spoon and spatula. Ms. Hourigan describes him as a Renaissance man, with interests in music, theater, food and travel. They all say he was completely devoted to Mr. Wojnarowicz.

Conceived by the gay rights activist Cleve Jones, the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt offered a way for friends and lovers to commemorate people who were often abandoned by their families. Ms. Vitale recalls that some found the news that their children were gay even harder to accept than the fact that they were dying. The Quilt had its first public showing on the National Mall in 1987, when it consisted of just 1,920 panels, each measuring three by six feet, about the size of the average grave. “At the time, I said, ‘This is our Arlington,’” Ms. Carr said, comparing the Quilt to the national military cemetery. It now memorializes more than 94,000 people in 50,000 panels and weighs about 54 tons. (Among those panels is one Mr. Wojnarowicz designed for his onetime lover, longtime friend and enduring mentor, the photographer Peter Hujar, of whom he said, “Everything I made, I made for Peter.”) Mr. Jones wrote of the Quilt in his 2016 book, “When We Rise: My Life in the Movement,” that “It could be therapy, I hoped, for a community that was increasingly paralyzed by grief and rage and powerlessness.” That is proved by the experience of these women, who have found it very moving, and helpful in working through their grief.

To talk to them is to quickly learn that, for them, the height of the AIDS crisis was not so long ago at all, that the grief remains, and that the current pandemic brings back vivid memories of seeing close friends and loved ones mowed down by a mysterious killer, of checking the obituaries each morning to see who had been taken from them now.

“At least one terrible thing is the same — a failed response from the federal government,” Ms. Carr said. “But that’s for different reasons. “During the AIDS epidemic, there was so much homophobia. During Covid, we’ve had Trump denying reality.” Caregiving has been on Ms. Foos’s mind: “We’ve been caring for each other in grief for so many years.” Another echo is the presence of Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, whose sober, fact-based assessments of the Covid-19 pandemic have served as a counterweight to those of the president; he was both the object of gratitude and the target of protests from AIDS activists.

“It’s really an honor,” Ms. Mansion said of the act of creating quilts for the couple, adding that she feels no small pressure. “You want to make them really, really good,” she said. “I feel like they’re looking over my shoulder, and I want David and Tom to approve of what we did!”