National Portrait Gallery Visitor Brings His Own Copy of “A Fire in My Belly.”
Submitted by GIA News on December 7, 2010
(12-7-10) On Sunday at around 1 pm, 37-year-old Washingtonian Mike Blasenstein hung an iPad around his neck, held some flyers in his hands -- and promptly got banned, or so he believes, from the Smithsonian Institution. That iPad was playing a video called “A Fire in My Belly,” by the artist David Wojnarowicz, who died of AIDS in 1992 and Blasenstein was standing at the National Portrait Gallery, just outside the entrance to a gay-themed exhibition called “Hide/Seek.”