MISSING: When East Village Artists Came to Main Street

Cressman Center 

100 East Main Street, Louisville, KY 40202 

March 20 – May 2, 2026 

The Hite Institute of Art + Design is pleased to present MISSING: When East Village Artists Came to Main Street, an exhibition that returns to December 1985 when five New York artists traveled to Louisville to stage an unlikely show in a vacant building at 600 East Main Street.  

Mounted as a fundraiser for Kentucky’s Child Victims’ Trust Fund, the 1985 Missing Children Show featured new work by David Wojnarowicz, Judy Glantzman, Rich Colicchio, Kiely Jenkins, and Futura 2000. Dubbed “the new irascibles,” this group of artists defined New York’s new East Village avant-garde scene with a mix of graffiti, painterly expressionism, social commentary, and impassioned advocacy.  

MISSING brings these artists back to Louisville’s Main Street for an exhibition of 1980s art alongside photographs and ephemera from the historic Missing Children Show. This exhibit is made possible with generous support from the John Burton Harter Foundation and The David Wojnarowicz Foundation. It is co-curated by Hite Professors Jennifer Sichel and Chris Reitz. 

A central feature of MISSING is a reproduction of a mural by David Wojnarowicz, which loomed large in the makeshift exhibition space in 1985. It depicts an exploding house, animal carcasses, a globe, and a gagging cow—images that would become icons in the artist’s visual vocabulary. In 2022, the mural was discovered preserved behind drywall. Today, it is the only known surviving mural by Wojnarowicz, who died of AIDS in 1992 “due to government neglect,” in the artist’s words. The mural should be a point of pride for our city. But in August of 2025 the building's current owner covered the mural again with drywall painted black evoking the sadly familiar violence of censorship and erasure that continues to haunt Wojnarowicz’s work long after his death. At the Cressman Center, a large-scale photo reproduction will stand in for the now-absent mural.  

The reproduction is accompanied by additional work by Wojanarowicz, capturing his evolving stylistics in this transitional decade. Judy Glantzman’s uncanny, tender portraits and Rich Colicchio’s disembodied heads demonstrate the playful, often pointedly political return to figuration at this moment. Futura 2000’s abstract graffiti locates this work within the downtown street aesthetic of the Lower East Side, while Kiely Jenkins’ odd sculptural forms affirm this street vernacular and rephrase it for the gallery wall.  

Altogether, these exuberate East Village peers compose an important and under-appreciated moment of 1980s artmaking, just before the wider acknowledgment of the AIDS Crisis and the artistic turn to explicit activism.  

MISSING: When East Village Artists Came to Main Street restores a nearly forgotten moment in the history of American art while celebrating Louisville’s unlikely role in this downtown scene. Importantly, the show aims to bring attention to the historic mural hidden away in our city.