The Missing Children Show

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The Missing Children Show: Six Artists from the East Village on Main Street
Kentucky Lithograph Building, Louisville, KY
1985

About

The Missing Children Show was an exhibit put on in 1985 in Louisville, Kentucky to raise money for the Kentucky Child Victims' Trust Fund. Wojnarowicz and

five other artists were invited to take part, including Judy Glantzman, with whom Wojnarowicz became close.

According to Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz,

“One report in a Louisville newspaper called David’s piece a ‘macabre representation of a child snatching.’ He’d brought the yellow skeleton
with him from the Anchorage show and suspended it facedown from the ceiling over a black chair with flames painted on it. ‘The chair is hell, ‘ David told a
reporter. ‘It’s a metaphor for the aftermath of that kind of act.’ He had a crawling battery-powered doll, with a globe for a head, on the chair’s seat,
restrained by a string. In front of it were targets like those used on a firing range, with a deer pictured at center. On the back wall he painted a field
of cow carcasses, beheaded and slit open. On a wall to the side he added his trademark large gagging cow. Five other East Village artists had been invited
to Kentucky to work in an old factory undergoing conversion to apartments, the closest thing the curator could find to an abandoned New York Building. The
art would be destroyed when that renovation occurred.” ^[1]