Who is David Wojnarowicz, the artist who inspired Dan Levy's Met Gala Look?
The Schitt’s Creek star stunned in an ensemble inspired by the late gay artist David Wojnarowicz.
Cover photo: Dan Levy at the 2021 Met Gala (2021). Photo by Mike Coppola / Getty Images and via PopSugar.
CONTENT WARNING: The article includes graphic language and homophobia.
Dan Levy at the 2021 Met Gala (2021). Photo by John Shearer / Getty Images and via Vanity Fair (cropped).
There were plenty of incredible looks at last night’s annual Met Gala — the first since 2019 — but one in particular caught my attention, that of first time guest Dan Levy’s hand-embroidered ensemble in homage to the late gay artist David Wojnarowicz.
Levy, the 38-year-old Canadian, is best known as the co-creator and star of Pop TV’s Schitt’s Creek, in which he plays the son — coincidentally, named David — of the suddenly dispossessed Rose family.
Loewe’s Jonathan Anderson created the custom piece for the actor; inspired by the brief of “gay superhero”. The theme of this year’s Met Gala was prompted by the new Costume Institute exhibition, In America: A Lexicon of Fashion.
Anderson recreated Wojnarowicz’s 1984 work, Fuck You Faggot Fucker, which features an illustration of two men kissing, as Anderson describes, “amid a background of world maps, indicating the arbitrary borders and divisions the queer community faced.” The title of the work is derived from a homophobic cartoon reappropriated by the artist. In the words of Zachary Small, Wojnarowicz “affixes it into a constellation of images that celebrate queer contact rather than caricaturing it.”
A self-taught artist, Wojnarowicz worked in a variety of media, creating art to digest his own trauma. Wojnarowicz’s own childhood was quite difficult. He was neglected by his mother and beaten by his alcoholic father, before he ran away from home.
Wojnarowicz defaced maps as a way to rebel against the rules of a world that rejected him. Writes art teacher Ciaran Freeman for America Magazine, “Through collage, he reconfigures geopolitical boundaries while prompting the viewer to reimagine our notion of what is normal.”
Fuck You Faggot Fucker, four gelatin silver prints, acrylic, and collaged paper on composition board, by David Wojnarowicz (1984). Via Vice.
Creating explicitly queer art during the Reagan era, Wojnarowicz developed a reputation as an artist activist. “My queerness was a wedge slowly separating me from a sick society,” he explained. In his memoir, Close to the Knives, Wojnarowicz wrote, “First there is the World. Then there is the Other World. The Other World is where I sometimes lose my footing … The Other World where I’ve always felt like an alien.”
Levy himself struggled with this “Other World”. As a young teenager, Levy was paralyzed by a severe anxiety that physically manifested into iritis, threatening to destroy his eyesight. “I think that came from a deep-rooted fear of knowing that I was gay and not being able to be free,” Levy explained in an interview with Bustle.
Levy has now become a queer icon, thanks largely to his role as the pansexual David Rose. In one particularly memorable scene from the Schitt’s Creek series, David tells his friend Stevie, “I like the wine and not the label, does that make sense?”
Dan Levy’s character David Rose explains, “I like the wine and not the label.” on Pop TV’s Schitt’s Creek (2015). Via Tumblr.
In April of 2020, following the air of the series finale, over 1800 mothers of the private Facebook group Serendipity Doo-Dah for Moms wrote to the cast and crew, “We sincerely believe that shows like Schitt’s Creek will serve as a catalyst to help change the world into a kinder, safer, more loving place for all LGBTQ people to live, and because of that, we will remain forever grateful.” Since the finale, Schitt’s Creek has found a new audience through streaming.
At the Gala, Levy was accessorized with a Cartier watch and clutch which featured yet another artwork by Wojnarowicz, Untitled (One Day This Kid), which documents the torment that a young Wojnarowicz would come to endure such as “loss of home, civil rights, jobs, and all conceivable freedoms” as a result of his sexuality. Wojnarowicz died of AIDS in 1992, at the age of thirty-seven, five years after losing his love Peter Hujar to the same illness.
In the final essay of his memoir — like an incantation — Wojnarowicz repeated, “Smell the flowers while you can.” From one queer artist to another, it is heartening to see the confidence and tenacity of lost generations flourish through new icons. Levy’s ensemble is both a touching tribute to the past and a monument of hope for the future.
Untitled (One Day this Kid), photstat, by David Wojnarowicz (1990-91). Via PPOW Gallery.
