Martin Wong

Seventeen years ago, AIDS killed Martin Wong, an artist I'd never heard until a New York Times critic raved about a retrospective of his work at the Bronx Museum of Arts.

Here's what he looked like before he joined the Cockettes and left San Francisco:

Wong fancied himself as a rodeo cowboy after moving to New York.  Note the weird little demons that float around him. He was HIV positive by the time of this self portrait.

Divine may have influenced Wong to move East.  Wong was a member of the Cockettes when Divine visited San Francisco in 1970.

Wong called himself the "Human Instamatic." He painted in Loisaida, a mostly Puerto Rican neighborhood and hung out with taggers, or graffiti artists.

Wong shifted his focus to Chinatown once the gentrification of the Lower East Side began.

There aren't many women in the show.

He obviously preferred painting men, including Bruce Lee.

Wong celebrated multiculturalism decades before it became politically correct.

It isn't difficult to interpret his shout-out to the Statue of Liberty.

Wong painted bricks, an unlikely subject, painstakingly well.

Like sign language, tabloid humor, books, eight balls and constellations, they're a common motif in his work.

Firefighters and prisons were among Wong's obsessions.

He and and Miguel Pinero, who wrote the prison drama Short Eyes based on his own incarceration experience, were boyfriends.

This penis hangs in a separate gallery.  More bricks!

Wong's biggest work hangs in the museum lobby.  It reminds me of Lolita.

When Wong got sick, he moved back to San Francisco so his parents could take care of him. His last works are utterly bereft of color.

Wong would have been 70 in July.