In the mid-1980s, as gentrification encroached on the East Village, the neighborhood’s eastern fringe remained a lawless landscape of abandoned buildings and rubble-strewn lots. Here in Alphabet City, amid the thriving drug trade, squatters surreptitiously reclaimed unused real estate. In 1986, a group of artist squatters led by Tenesh Webber sledgehammered their way into 292 East Third Street, between Avenues C and D. Accommodating living spaces as well as an exhibition space, Bullet Space quickly became a nexus for the East Village tradition of politically radical, semi-legal street art.

Bullet Space’s most ambitious project, the handmade artist’s book “Your House Is Mine” is a set of posters waging, as Elizabeth Hess described in “Artforum” (October 1991), “an ongoing class war against landlords, drugs, and AIDS and an eloquent protest against the lack of a safe environment for children.” From 1988 to 1992, Bullet Space worked with selected artists at the Bullet Print Shop and the Lower East Side Print Shop to create the 33 prints that would appear first as street posters, and subsequently as a limited-edition artist’s book, produced with Nadia Coen and Paul Castrucci. With contributions from Sandra “Lady Pink” Fabara, David Wojnarowicz, Anton van Dalen, John Fekner, Lee Quiñones, and other local street artists, the book is now seen as an essential record of the politically assertive art of the Lower East Side at the end of the century.

There are two limited edition versions of “Democracy” produced by Wojnarowicz, the black-and-white print being the earliest and rarest. The black-and-white copies were also used for wheat-pasting in the Loisaida neighborhood of the Lower East Side, leaving few in existence. This signed Artist’s Proof is from Wojnarowicz’s personal collection.

That “A Fire in My Belly” is about spirituality, and about AIDS, is beyond doubt. To those caught up in the crisis, the worst years of the epidemic were like an extended Day of the Dead, a time of skulls and candles, corruption with promise of resurrection. Wojnarowicz was profoundly angry at a government that barely acknowledged the epidemic and at political forces that he believed used AIDS, and the art created in response, to demonize homosexuals.

The photograph was a gift from David Wojnarowicz to fellow East Village artist Richard Morrison.