Stay away from nothing shines a spotlight on the deep relationship between Paul Thek and Peter Hujar through the artists’ letters and photographs. Beginning in 1956 and spanning two decades, the publication opens a window into their intimate, complex, and beautiful lives, starting with a sequence of images by Hujar that showcases the two of them in innocent moments of pensive and haunting play in Coral Gables and beyond.
By Min Chen published November 7, 2025 on Art Net
In all, Peter Hujar lived a brief 19,401 days. For most of those days, his unblinking eye was alive to the world. Countless more days, he spent capturing people and places in images of intense depth and beauty. But only one of those days has been documented with exquisite clarity.
In the winter of 1974, Hujar visited his friend Linda Rosenkrantz’s apartment. At her request, he had made notes about what he did the day before—December 18, a Wednesday—and began relating it to her. His account was to be included in the writer’s new project documenting how various people remembered a day in their life (Chuck Close was another interviewee). The photographer spared no detail as he told Rosenkrantz what he did, who he met, what he ate, how he felt, what he wore, and how many naps he took. “I didn’t do anything,” he admits at one point. His narrative begs to differ.
That one day now forms the heart of Peter Hujar’s Day, a new film by director Ira Sachs, hot off his 2023 movie Passages. Sachs, however, has not recreated Hujar’s day scene for scene, but rather, the retelling of his day—essentially the very long conversation between Hujar and Rosenkrantz, played by Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall. What compelled the filmmaker was the rapport and shared language that transpired in the pair’s dialogue, as much as its content.
“All I ever want is intimacy and authenticity,” Sachs told me over a video call. “It’s all there.”
Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall in Peter Hujar’s Day (2025), directed by Ira Sachs. Photo courtesy of Janus Films.
Rosenkrantz’s broader day-in-the-life project was never realized. The original transcript of her interview with Hujar was donated in 2019 to New York’s Morgan Library and Museum, home to a large repository of the photographer’s work. In 2021, it was published by Magic Hour Press in a compact volume, which Sachs encountered in a gay bookstore while filming Passages in Paris.
In the book, the director, who admits to owning “almost every Hujar monograph,” saw a new picture of Hujar emerge. He also saw his next project, one that was small but revealing, contained yet vast.
“I wasn’t interested in making a film about Peter Hujar. I was interested in the text that Linda Rosenkrantz created about this afternoon she had with Peter Hujar—this conversation between two friends that had been reclaimed,” he explained, adding of its cosy scale: “I embrace the magnitude of the minimal.”
While Rosenkrantz’s text effectively served as a readymade script (with some light tinkering from Sachs), translating it into a visual, temporal medium called for considerations of set and setting. Sachs first thought to film Peter and Linda’s conversation in real-time before abandoning the idea as it seemed too static: “This was setting myself up for a catastrophe,” he thought.
He almost scrapped the entire project six weeks out from shooting until he checked out Jim McBride’s 1969 documentary My Girlfriend’s Wedding. That film centers solely on McBride’s then-lover Clarissa Ainley confessing to the camera her reasons for marrying another man. The cuts in that movie, Sachs said, were much like those in Andy Warhol’s Poor Little Rich Girl (1965), representing jumps in time and location, much like an ellipse.
“The ellipse becomes the nature of movement,” he said. “The ellipse gave me permission to adjust my understanding of the film to one that would abstractly move through time, based on decisions I made as a filmmaker.”
In Peter Hujar’s Day, we see Peter and Linda converse in her living room, her kitchen, her terrace, and her bed—all of it shot on 16mm film at a split-level apartment at Westbeth Artists Housing. The change in locations marks the passage of time, but so do their movements. Linda boils water to brew tea; Peter lights a cigarette then later, retrieves a new pack from his coat hanging by the door. They’re gestures that inject dynamism into the scenes, forming an almost choreographed dance to background the conversation. In a way, Sachs said, it’s almost “an action film.”
But, he added, it’s also “a film that’s a sequence of portraits of subjects in space and in light.”
Whishaw and Hall’s portrayals are lived-in ones; their back-and-forth belying an easy camaraderie. While Whishaw took to ingesting 55 pages worth of dialogue that exemplified what he called Hujar’s “obsessiveness,” Hall turned to the real-life Rosenkrantz, now 91, to nail her open-heartedness and clear love for the artist. “When I spoke to Linda, it was just so apparent how much she adored him,” Hall said in production notes. “And looking at photographs of the two of them from the time, you could see the intimacy there.” (Sachs called Rosenkrantz a “fairy godmother” to the film.)
Rebecca Hall in Peter Hujar’s Day (2025), directed by Ira Sachs. Photo courtesy of Janus Films.
What surfaces during the course of Hujar and Rosenkrantz’s exchange, of course, are more than the banal details of his one day. “The things that happen over the course of this day are quite small things,” Whishaw reflected in production notes, “but they nonetheless speak somehow about who he was.”
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Hujar’s warmth toward his friend shows up (Rosenkrantz, in turn, worries about his eating and smoking habits), as does his unsurprising ability to color in a scene. His dry humor crackles. At one point, he complains at length about Ed Baynard, an artist he calls “totally insane,” who is prone to tying him up on the phone. He tells Rosenkrantz of her project, “If this ever gets printed, I hope it’s printed with his name.”
“Anything that adds to Peter’s reputation as an important photographer gives me pleasure,” Rosenkrantz said in production notes. “Peter died penniless and only known among a certain group of people. I think that hearing his voice, so to speak, in the book and in the film really tells people who he was.”
Sachs himself discovered Hujar in the late ’80s, via a show at Matthew Marks gallery (the director doesn’t own a work by Hujar, he said, but Whishaw does). To him, Hujar creates portraits the same way the author Henry James crafts his novels. “They have that depth and narrative quality. They’re technically exquisite,” he explained. “They bring majesty to a subculture that I feel connected to and I want more of. They make major the marginalized in a way that gives me strength.”
That ethos is borne out in Sachs’s own work—from his intimate portrayal of domestic tensions in Little Men (2016) to Keep the Lights On (2012) and Passages, which fix a humanistic lens on the queer experience. His immersion in Hujar’s oeuvre is such that, he said, “I think Peter and a whole group of artists from the East Village have become my ancestors. I live in relationship with them and I make work in relationship with them.”
Seeing the other side of the camera in Peter Hujar’s Day and glimpsing the photographer behind the photograph—even, and especially, with all his raw edges—struck another, deep chord.
“The gift of this text is how much Peter reveals his vulnerabilities as an artist,” he said. “He shares narratively how hard it is to make art. I find that very comforting because you’re like, ‘You too, Peter Hujar?’”
Peter Hujar’s Day is in theaters now.
By Rachel Pronger published 30 October 2025 for Frieze
How do you spend your days? How much time do you dedicate to eating, sleeping, working, wandering? Thanks to Linda Rosenkrantz, we know how Peter Hujar spent at least one of his. On Wednesday 18 December 1974, the photographer received a call instructing him to record everything he did that day. Rosenkrantz, a writer, had started a project in which she planned to document how her friends – fellow artists in New York’s downtown scene – spent a single day. On Thursday, Rosenkrantz invited Hujar to her apartment to tape a granular discussion of his every nap, sandwich and phone call in the past 24 hours.
Rosenkrantz’s project soon lost momentum and the interview was never published during Hujar’s lifetime. It wasn’t until the late-2010s that Rosenkrantz discovered a transcript of their conversation in her filing cabinet. She donated the document to the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, and in 2022 the transcript was reproduced as a book by Magic Hour Press.
Now, filmmaker Ira Sachs has turned that interview into an experimental feature. Peter Hujar’s Day (2025) is a quietly eccentric two-hander starring Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall as Hujar and Rosenkrantz, set almost entirely in one apartment and shot on flickering 16mm film. Across 76 quietly magnetic minutes, the pair drink tea, lounge on a sofa or bed as Whishaw’s Hujar delivers a blow-by-blow account of the previous day – from the chiming of his alarm clock to the late night shouts of sex workers outside his window.
Superficially, Sachs’s film appears to be an extension of the evolving cult of Hujar. Over the past decade, the photographer has been transformed from niche concern to art-world canon, buoyed partially by surging interest in AIDs-era artists such as Leigh Bowery, Nan Goldin and David Woznajowicz, and a growing hunger for revisionist queer histories. Hujar’s ascension to the top tier of 20th-century photographers has been recently confirmed in a flurry of notable shows. This year, in London, there was a presentation of his backstage nightclub and cabaret portraits by Pace at Frieze Masters; Raven Row’s show at the start of the year, ‘Eyes Open in the Dark’, spans the artist’s career. Across the Atlantic, Fraenkel Gallery recreated the Hujar’s groundbreaking 1986 exhibition in ‘The Gracie Mansion Show Revisited’ (2025) and the Ukrainian Museum in New York unveiled rarely seen portraits in ‘Peter Hujar: Rialto’ (2024).
This reappraisal is merited, but at times a fascination with the artist’s social milieu and famous friends risks flattening the rougher edges of Hujar’s life – his tough upbringing, financial precarity and volatile personality. While Sachs’s film doesn’t touch on the latter, what it does capture brilliantly is the tedious glamour of life as a working artist. Extraordinary incidents – a photoshoot with Allen Ginsberg, a phone call from Susan Sontag – are given equal weight as discussions of sleep schedules (two naps a day) and eating habits (rye sandwiches, cheap Chinese dinners). Hujar lists the fees of upcoming assignments and frets about money, while gossiping about his acquaintances (‘Nicky, the guy who does anal paintings!’) and moaning about his worsening eyesight.
Many of the details in Hujar’s day are familiar to any creative freelancer. To be a working artist might mean the odd glamorous encounter, but it also means precarious pay, simple food and the monotonous grind of ‘doing the work’. On that fateful Wednesday, Hujar had laboured into the early hours but the results left him disappointed. The prints he produced were ‘quite ordinary’ he informs Rosenkrantz, much to his chagrin.
Where other artist biopics lead with passion and inspiration, Sachs’s offers anxiety, fatigue and ordinariness. Hujar worries that ‘nothing much happens’ in his days; his late night overworking a symptom of the fear of squandered time. Yet, he acknowledges ‘sometimes I just have to stand and stare’ to find deeper meaning in his images. What drove Hujar to keep creating despite his frustrations is the same thing that makes Sachs’s audience continue watching despite the tedium; it’s those blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moments of being in the presence of something – or someone – greater than yourself.
The conceit of Peter Hujar’s Day is that making art is boring, that being an artist is boring. But I am not sure Sachs truly believes this. As shifting shards of light stream through the windows, Whishaw and Hall are momentarily transformed – beatific – and, for a few fragile seconds, something special becomes fleetingly, gloriously visible: even an ordinary human day can be incandescent.
Ira Sachs’s Peter Hujar’s Day has its theatrical release in North America on 7 November 2025 and the UK/Ireland on 2 January 2026
Press Release – Pace London
At the 2025 edition of Frieze Masters, Pace Gallery will present a selection of photographs by Peter Hujar, highlighting the artist’s backstage portraits of performers in the theatres and nightclubs of 1970s and ’80s New York. Featuring a group of 15 works printed by Hujar, Pace’s booth will underscore the celebrated artist’s transformative photographic eye and his extraordinary darkroom technique.
In 1974, Hujar was introduced to the Palm Casino Revue, an experimental theatre in the East Village and hub of avant-garde drag. There, and in other venues, he began photographing performers in and out of costume, often in intimate backstage settings where they dressed, rehearsed, rested, and posed for his camera. Both participant and documentarian of a pivotal moment in queer cultural history, Hujar also made his home and studio above the Eden Theater on East 12th Street a gathering place for artists, performers, and other vital downtown figures. The idea of life as performance runs throughout his work, and, while not a formal series, the backstage was one of his enduring themes. Many of his subjects were also friends and collaborators, including Charles Ludlam, founder of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, Mario Montez, one of Andy Warhol’s superstars, and artist Sheyla Baykal, among others.
Capturing a wide range of offstage postures and moods, Hujar’s images are unified by their penetrating view of transitional moments. At the heart of many of these performers’ acts, and often their personal lives too, was a fluid and radical understanding of gender. In the photographs, this plays out in part through the elaborate garments and makeup they don. Plumes of feathers, crisp white collars, masks, sequins, satin folds, and lustrous eyelash extensions call attention to and celebrate gender expression though dress. Hujar’s treatment of his subjects-sometimes tender, sometimes gregarious, and always straightforward -reveled in the expressive possibilities of costume, staging, and lighting, constructing images that distilled the subversive essence of their context.
All the works included in the presentation are lifetime prints —made by the artist himself. Hujar, who was technically skilled in the darkroom, made multiple prints of the same image to arrive at his desired effect. The contrast between sharp tonalites and the gradations between them were manipulated by the artist to dramatic heights—as much part of the image as the composition and subject. His black-and-white photographs were often centered within the square frame, thus rendering all his subjects with classical dignity. As objects, the works are physical items of exquisite beauty; as images, they bring forth the decades of joy, pain, struggle, and ecstasy of the figures they depict.
Earlier this year, Hujar was the subject of Eyes Wide Open in the Dark, a landmark exhibition at London’s Raven Row, co-curated by Gary Schneider and John Douglas Millar, who is also writing a forthcoming biography of the artist. This October will see the London premiere of Peter Hujar’s Day, a film directed by Ira Sachs and based on the book of the same name by Hujar’s friend Linda Rosenkrantz.
Pace represents The Peter Hujar Archive alongside Maureen Paley Gallery, London; Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco; and Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich.
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By Miss Rosen published 4 September 2025 for AnOther Magazine
In January 1986, the year before Peter Hujar died from AIDS, he staged Recent Photographs at Gracie Mansion Gallery in New York. It was a vision of a future he would never live to see, a world where photography upended the boundaries of high and low art, becoming the lingua franca of global society. Now, the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco has opened Peter Hujar: The Gracie Mansion Show Revisited, just as Hujar imagined it.
Envisioned as a mid-career survey comprising 70 meticulously crafted silver gelatin prints, Recent Photographs features Hujar’s signature portraits of friends and artists, tender nudes, raw landscapes, animals both dead and alive, and abandoned buildings hung in a grid two rows high. Evoking the pictorial paradise of his 1970s periodical, Newspaper, Hujar deftly wove images of fashion designer Charles James, drag performer Ethyl Eichelberger, Vogue editor Diana Vreeland, and jazz singer Peggy Lee into his sweeping vista of life, alongside portraits of Black men from his Mental Outpatient Series made in 1981, the year then-President Ronald Reagan deinstitutionalised state psychiatric hospitals, expelling patients into the streets to fend for themselves.
Hujar was an egalitarian, seeing beauty and truth as that which unites us in life and in death. He had arrived fully formed and had grown to become a creative force that existed beyond the trappings of commerce and careerism. Rather, he aligned himself with people of like mind, like his friend David Wojnarowicz, an artist who was then represented by artist and art dealer Gracie Mansion. “David came to me and asked if I would do a show for Peter. There was no hesitation. I was honoured,” says Mansion. “Peter had a strong presence. He carried himself with a power and a dynamic feel. You knew that he was a genius and he knew it too.”
Mansion embodied the ethos of the East Village avant garde, a world of artist-run galleries that worked as comrades and collaborators. She recognised the role of curation belonged to the exhibiting artist and created space for Hujar to bring his vision to life in the front room of the gallery. “It was impeccable,” Mansion remembers. “All day long, Peter was moving these pieces around. It was this dance. When it was done, I took the first walk through the exhibition and understood Peter in a different way. They’re all equal, and they’re all portraits.”
Nearly 40 years later, Hujar’s vision feels prescient, portending the endless digital scroll where seemingly disparate images suggest new connections. The Gracie Mansion Show Revisited stands as a testament to staying true to one’s inner vision for both the artist and gallery. “Peter Hujar didn’t really trust dealers; he didn’t like the way they represented his work and felt like they were ripping him off,” says artist and curator Sur Rodney (Sur), who was also co-director of the gallery. “People have asked if he was difficult because they heard he could be demanding, and we said, No, we gave him everything he wanted so he didn’t have anything to complain about.”
Sur sat in the Oak Room, a custom wood office with sliding glass doors and glass window panes, located in the front of the gallery. Hujar often joined him in this semi-private space, where he could relax and watch the scene outside of the spotlight. “I couldn’t tell you what we talked about, but I do remember Peter laughing a lot,” says Sur. “He wasn’t theatrical, dramatic, or overly expressive but he was great at telling a story. He always had a sense of being centred in himself, very comfortable talking to anyone. He was like that with animals, too; he’d have long conversations with animals in the field.”
Hujar installed his 1978 photograph, Cow, a lustrous, sloe-eyed bovine with a jaunty bit of hay draped from its lips, in the window of the gallery. It was, he told Sur, a self-portrait. Beyond the high cheekbones and streamlined physique, the artist and sitter seemed to share a moment of mutual recognition. Perhaps it was a throwback to his youth on his maternal Ukrainian grandparents’ farm in Ewing Township, New Jersey, where animals became his early friends and confidantes.
In total, Hujar would sell just two prints: a horse and a 1985 portrait of Andy Warhol superstar Jackie Curtis in his coffin, the latter to Fluxus artist Al Hansen, who had an exhibit in the gallery’s second room at the same time. “We sold tons of stuff from Al’s show, and he was somebody who didn’t care about money,” says Mansion. “Al always had a shopping bag in each hand and never knew where he was going to sleep. He probably couldn’t afford the full amount, so I told him to just pay Peter directly.”
This spirit of collectivism defined the East Village scene as it emerged as an artist-run antidote to the hypercapitalist New York art market – and captured the imagination of the media. Shortly before Recent Photographs opened, People magazine named Mansion and Sur as two of the “24 Most Intriguing People of 1985,” placing them between Madonna and Rock Hudson. But it was never about fame or money. “We were all doing it ourselves, and our only concern was being able to pay the rent,” Mansion says. “It was a community. We were artists, and these were our friends.”
Peter Hujar: The Gracie Mansion Show Revisited is on show at Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco until 25 October 2025.
Text by Sam Moore, published 6 October 2025 for Dazed
There’s a spark to the art of David Wojnarowicz, the prolific visual artist, writer and Aids activist. His work so often feels alive, with possibility, with danger, and sometimes with fear. Whether in one of his most famous images, in which a herd of buffalo are tumbling down a cliff, or street art murals like The Missing Children Show (1985), where an exploding house is flanked by a viewfinder that stares down a series of cadavers, with Earth lingering above in orbit, an uncaring sentinel.
Now, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art is preparing to exhibit a series of Wojnarowicz’s most iconic images, Arthur Rimbaud in New York (1990), in which the artist and a collection of friends were photographed throughout New York, wearing masks of the French poet’s face. This comes alongside a new publication edited by the exhibition’s curator, Antonio Sergio Bessa, with new writing on Wojnarowicz alongside Rimbaud in New York. Rimbaud captures the core of Wojnarowicz’s artistic process: a sense of collaboration and artistic community; a formal inventiveness, where the artist does a lot with a little; and a keen, politically-charged eye, which here casts itself over the transformations of New York and the artist’s own childhood.
Wojnarowicz’s art drew on the narratives of his own life, the political landscape in which he found himself, and the artistic community of which he was a part. With a lo-fi, punk aesthetic and a refusal to look away from the world around him, his art continues to galvanise, challenge, and frighten in equal measure, even decades after his death.
Despite his travels to Europe – even going to Paris with the intent of living there in 1978 – America is inescapable in the art of David Wojnarowicz. Whether railing against the politics of his time, or creating imagery that challenged images and ideas of Americana, Wojnarowicz’s art is constantly grappling with the contradictions and violence of life and death in the United States
If there’s an image by Wojnarowicz that you recognise, even if you think you know nothing about the artist, then it’s Untitled (Buffalos) (1988-89). It’s been used on the cover of the U2 single “One”, and as a poster for Ari Aster’s film Eddington (2025). Wojnarowicz’s original image comes from a diorama in the Smithsonian of buffalo being herded off a cliff, plummeting to their death (a native American hunting method). Taken in the years following the artist’s Aids diagnosis, it becomes a critique of his country’s mistreatment of those who contracted the disease.
Wojnarowicz was a constant collaborator, creating work alongside other artists in the East Village avant-garde; people like Peter Hujar, Nan Goldin, and Kikki Smith. He appeared in films by Richard Kern and directed alongside Tommy Turner, his creative impulses always searching for new outlets. And so it’s no wonder that he would also find himself involved in the Cinema of Transgression: low-budget, experimental films designed to shock.
The spectre of death looms large in Wojnarowicz’s work. His buffalo are frozen on an inevitable descent to the grave; some of his most famous, unsettling images are of friends in their final moments, and in a comic book project he worked on with the artist James Romberger, sex and death are intertwined as two bodies together create a bizarre, violent moment of flesh coming apart. Death was everywhere in Wojnarowicz’s life, and would serve as a major catalyst in his work. Yet whenever he looks at death, he always seems to be daring it to look back at him….
Full article on Dazed
David Wojnarowicz: Arthur Rimbaud in New York is running at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art until 18 January 2026.
By Tony Bravo published 5 October 2025 in San Francisco Chronicle
Peter Hujar’s photographs are haunting, glamorous, gorgeously grotesque, emotionally devastating and above all, honest.
Now, Bay Area audiences have a unique opportunity to immerse themselves in the world of this under-sung master of 20th century photography.
With “Peter Hujar: The Gracie Mansion Show Revisited,” the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco is recreating a now-legendary 1986 show in New York’s East Village presented by gallerist Gracie Mansion. The 70 photographs include portraits of friends, artists and dogs; nudes; landscapes; scenes of decaying abandoned buildings; and images of animals, living and dead.
“What became obvious to me, living with this show, was that everything was a portrait,” Mansion said in a discussion about the work for Fraenkel Gallery, highlighting how Hujar brought that point of view even to inanimate objects and scenes.
The Fraenkel presentation reproduces the original exhibition layout and even includes some prints from the 1986 show.
Hujar died a year after that exhibition, on Nov. 26, 1987, of complications from the AIDS virus that was devastating the queer and artistic communities. He was 53 years old.
In a perfect bit of synchronicity, on Friday-Saturday, Oct. 10-11, the Mill Valley Film Festival is screening the new film “Peter Hujar’s Day” written and directed by Ira Sachs. It stars Ben Whishaw as the photographer and Rebecca Hall as writer Linda Rosenkranz, Hujar’s oldest friend.
The film is based on Rosenkranz’s book of the same name, in which she interviewed Hujar solely about what he had done the previous day, Dec. 18, 1974. In the course of the film, Hujar recounts both the extraordinary and the mundane, from photographing poet Allen Ginsberg to daydreaming about the man ahead of him in line at a Chinese restaurant.
When I met Hujar’s friend and executor Stephen Koch at the Fraenkel Gallery show opening, he said that Whishaw absolutely captured Hujar’s voice in his performance. Watching the movie, one has the sense that the actor was both channeling the real Hujar and also giving such an idiosyncratic, specific performance with each gesture that he was creating something as artistically original as the photographer’s own work. You get the same feeling from the film — Hujar’s great, candid gossip, asides and his recall of details — as you do the book.
…The work on view at Fraenkel Gallery through Oct. 25 feels as intimate as “Peter Hujar’s Day” book and film, with the curation mixing images of life and death. “David Wojnarowicz: Manhattan-Night (III)” (1985) shows the artist who was also Hujar’s lover and friend in close up, his full lips sensual, every freckle on his face realized. Hujar’s portrait of his acquaintance Bob Berg (1985) shows his mastery of lighting and shadow, a skill likely honed in a 1967 master class he took with photographers Richard Avedon and Marvin Israel. I’m obsessed with the definition of Berg’s curls in the photo and the single light catching hair across his forehead.
…But it is the deterioration shown in the abandoned rooms and buildings as well as dead animal photos that give the work bite. There’s a sense of inevitable finality in many of these photos, particularly “Jackie Curtis Is Dead” (1985), which shows the Warhol star laid out in an open casket.
These works, and the new film, are poignant reminders that Hujar was an artist taken too soon.
Full article in San Francisco Chronicle
Get tickets to Mill Valley Film Festival screening Peter Hujar’s Day October 10 and October 11
Peter Hujar: The Gracie Mansion Show Revisited is on view until October 25, 2025 at Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
“The decisions are governed by something I can’t really put into words. I’ve selected things that I love by dint of their poetry, their beauty, their refusal, their internal logic and, above all, their power. Each artist here invents the language they need and there is magic in it.” – Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.
Hayward Gallery Touring presents To Improvise A Mountain, curated by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. Bringing together artists that have been critical to her way of seeing and thinking, Yiadom-Boakye invites audiences on a personal journey through different geographies, generations of artists, and artworks that create their own emotional landscapes of intensity, intimacy, refusal, activism, and wonder.
Both an artist and a writer, Yiadom-Boakye is renowned for her oil paintings of imagined, enigmatic subjects. She says of her process: “My deployment of words in writing is not always so different to my use of brush marks in painting. The logic, patterns, relationships, repetitions and decisions are guided by intuition and a means of thinking through what is felt. That’s how I wanted to approach this show. And I wanted to bring together works by artists whose vision beguiles me: fellow poets, dreamers, thinkers and wanderers.”
Intuitive and guided by poetry’s dynamic ability to think through rhythm, image and feeling, the exhibition brings Yiadom-Boakye’s work into conversation with an eclectic range of historical and contemporary artists, illuminating her creative process.
Among the artists featured in this exhibition are Bas Jan Ader, Pierre Bonnard, Lisa Brice, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Samuel Fosso, Peter Hujar, Kahlil Joseph, Toyin Ojih Odutola, The Otolith Group, Jennifer Packer, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Walter Sickert and David Wojnarowicz.
Tour dates:
16 May – 5 October 2025 (last days!)
Leeds Art Gallery, Leeds
25 October 2025 – 25 January 2026
MK Gallery, Milton Keynes
In Peter Hujar: The Gracie Mansion Show Revisited, Fraenkel Gallery recreates the now-legendary exhibition that took place in New York’s East Village in 1986, one year before the artist’s death. For the show, Gracie Mansion Gallery presented 70 photographs including portraits of friends and fellow artists, nudes, landscapes, and pictures of animals and abandoned buildings. Hung in a long grid two rows high, the exhibition freely mixed genres and subjects, creating a sequence that encouraged multiple associations. Fraenkel Gallery’s new exhibition presents a version of the original 1986 layout, offering contemporary viewers a chance to experience Hujar’s work as he conceived it. This will be Fraenkel Gallery’s sixth exhibition of Hujar’s work since 2002. The gallery will hold a public reception for the show and a concurrent exhibition Katy Grannan: Mad River on Saturday, September 13, from 2-4pm.
The 1986 exhibition, titled Peter Hujar: Recent Photographs, was the artist’s eighth and final solo show. Before his death, Hujar was recognized for his extraordinary photographs by a small but influential group in downtown New York that included avant-garde artists, writers, and performers, a circle that often overlapped with his portrait subjects. By the time of the show, his work had been featured in solo exhibitions in New York and Europe, and he had published one catalogue and his only book, Portraits in Life and Death. Gallerist Gracie Mansion organized the exhibition with Sur Rodney (Sur), at the suggestion of Hujar’s close friend, artist David Wojnarowicz. The gallery had included Hujar’s work in group shows, but Recent Photographs was his first solo exhibition since 1981. Following a difficult period, Hujar had perhaps hoped for sales as the market for photography began to grow, but very few photographs sold. While the show was not a commercial success, the opening reception drew an enthusiastic crowd, followed by an after-party in the Mike Todd Room at the Palladium nightclub.
“Looking back to his show, it drew so many of the New York luminaries,” recalls Mansion. “Peter was a star. The show was a triumph.”
Beyond its memorable opening night, the exhibition’s expansive approach and distinctive format provide valuable insight into the artist’s thinking about his work. Matted and hung inches apart, the photographs are sequenced so that images from the same genre rarely follow each other in any direction. A cow chews straw across from English actor David Warrilow, photographed nude. A portrait of Warhol superstar Jackie Curtis dead in a coffin abuts a New Jersey landscape and a drag queen showing off a tattooed thigh. Fashion editor Diana Vreeland sits next to a close-up showing the feet of Australian artist and dancer Vali Meyer and a trash pit in Queens. The arrangement highlights the individuality of every person, place, or animal, inviting the viewer to move in and out of the grid as connections between images grow and fade or shift. As Hujar once noted, “I photograph those who push themselves to any extreme. That’s what interests me, and people who cling to the freedom to be themselves.” Rather than comparing his subjects with each other, he was determined to see the singularity in each, an aim the exhibition supports.
For a closer look at the 1986 exhibition, see Deep Dive: The Gracie Mansion Show Revisited
By Alex Jovanovich, Agosto Machado published in Artforum September 2025 Issue
A PHOTO OF MACHADO BY PETER HUJAR
“Peter didn’t like this photo of me, but it’s my favorite. It’s the best portrait he ever took of me (although I think I’m showing too much breast here). I just love the attitude, the cast shadow, the mood. It’s not very close-up—the distance makes me look a little more glamorous. I thrifted the outfit and wore it in productions for Ethyl Eichelberger.”
…
SOME HEARTS MIRACULOUSLY ENDURE. Agosto Machado—artist, activist, thespian, muse, historian, raconteur, and perennial fashion plate—is one of them.
Machado grew up an orphan in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood and spent much of his youth without a roof over his head and nary a dollar to his name. He and his fellow “street queens,” as they described themselves, sought one another out for comradeship and survival. In the late 1950s, he felt the pull of Greenwich Village, where bohemianism and unabashed queerness offered a refuge from the oppressiveness of straight life. A little later on, he became a linchpin of the downtown theater scene, working with and acting for some of off-off-off-Broadway’s crème de la crème, including playwright and Warholette Jackie Curtis, artist and filmmaker Jack Smith, Ellen Stewart of the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, dramatist and drag doyenne Ethyl Eichelberger, and John Vaccaro’s Playhouse of the Ridiculous…
… In the following pages, you will encounter only a tiny cross section of Machado’s enormous trove, which might be one of the most astonishing and eclectic portraits of an era (or eras) ever rendered. The centerpiece of this portfolio, Untitled (Snapshots), 2022, is a memorial work comprising pictures Machado took of his friends and fellow travelers throughout the years, and includes a list naming all those depicted, some of whom have been individually highlighted here with Machado’s stories about them. You also will be able to gaze upon a selection of objects from the artist’s cache, to a few of which have been appended Machado’s recollections of how he obtained them. To my mind, every item and photo you meet here functions like a little valentine—a heart-shaped thing that, miraculously, has endured. —Alex Jovanovich
Full article in Artforum
Machado’s second solo exhibition at New York’s Gordon Robichaux gallery opens September 7 and runs until October 26.
Shifting Landscapes explores how evolving political, ecological, and social issues motivate artists’ representations of the world around them. While the art historical genre of landscape has long been associated with picturesque vistas and documentary accounts of place, the artworks gathered in this exhibition suggest a more expansive interpretation. The 120 works by more than 80 artists—including Firelei Báez, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jane Dickson, Gordon Matta-Clark, Amalia Mesa-Bains, and Purvis Young—depict the effects of industrialization on the environment, grapple with the impact of geopolitical borders, and give shape to imagined spaces as a way of destabilizing the concept of a “natural” world. Drawn from the Whitney’s collection, this exhibition features works from the 1960s to the present, most of which are on view at the Museum for the first time. The exhibition is organized in thematic sections that reflect the many meanings embedded in the idea of landscape. Together, these works bring concepts of land and place into focus, foregrounding how we shape and are shaped by the spaces around us.
Shifting Landscapes is organized by Jennie Goldstein, Jennifer Rubio Associate Curator of the Collection; Marcela Guerrero, DeMartini Family Curator; Roxanne Smith, Senior Curatorial Assistant; with Angelica Arbelaez, Rubio Butterfield Family Fellow; with thanks to Araceli Bremauntz-Enriquez and J. English Cook for research support.
Published 1 July 2025 on Meer Art
Matthew Marks is pleased to announce Cats & Apples, the upcoming exhibition at his gallery located at 1062 North Orange Grove in Los Angeles. The show centers on two enduring motifs that have captivated artists for centuries: cats and apples. Spanning over one hundred years of artistic production, the exhibition includes a wide range of media—painting, sculpture, drawing, photography, and video.
The exhibition features works by fifteen artists: Georges Braque, Joan Brown, Leidy Churchman, Edwin Dickinson, Vincent Fecteau, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Katharina Fritsch, Robert Gober, Nan Goldin, Peter Hujar, Gary Hume, Laura Owens, Pablo Picasso, Linda Stark, and Sturtevant. Drawing from diverse sources such as art historical references like memento mori and Ingres’s bathers, 1960s cartoons, and childhood memories, these artists reinterpret familiar imagery in unexpected ways.
Through a playful yet deeply reflective lens, Cats & Apples invites viewers to consider how ordinary symbols can carry profound emotional and cultural resonance. The exhibition offers a fresh perspective on timeless themes, celebrating both their historical legacy and contemporary relevance.
By Larry Humber published 24 June 2025 for The Art Newspaper
The Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) has acquired 210 photographs by the Ukrainian American photographer Peter Hujar (1934-87). The acquisitions comes as the gallery’s photography department prepares to celebrate its 25th anniversary with the exhibition Collective Visions: Celebrating 25 Years of Photography (opening 7 November), which will feature around 80 works chosen by the local community.
Hujar, who is best known for his black-and-white portraits, spent the bulk of his life in New York City and captured, among others, many of the figures in its thriving artistic scene from the 1960s to the 80s. The works acquired by the AGO all come from the Hujar Archive.
“In bringing these 210 works by Peter Hujar to the AGO, we afford audiences and scholars an opportunity to see the full breadth and richness of Hujar’s career and his working methods,” says Sophie Hackett, the gallery’s photography curator. “We are working on how and when to best present a fulsome group of the Hujar photographs, but nothing is firm yet. One may appear in the 25th anniversary exhibition, but we will have to wait to see how the selections unfold….”
Despite the formal refinement of his work and its historic value as a time capsule of a booming Lower Manhattan art scene—one that would soon be devastated by the HIV/Aids epidemic, which also claimed him—Hujar has been slow in receiving widespread recognition. Recent institutional shows, including during last year’s Venice Biennale, at the Ukrainian Museum in New York City and at Raven Row in London, plus an unconventional biopic of sorts, starring Ben Whishaw, are helping to change that.
“I believe there are twin factors at play here,” Hackett says. “First, museums were slow to accept photography as a medium of artistic expression—happily, that is no longer a question. Second, Hujar was involved with the gay liberation movement in the 1960s and 70s. The understanding and appreciation of his work can in some ways be tracked to greater acceptance for 2SLGBTQ+ communities in general. With a couple of generations of scholars and curators who have grown up in the wake of that movement, it’s now possible to see how radical and formative Hujar’s vision has been.”
‘ Without resorting to hyperbole, [Eyes Open in the Dark] was one of the best exhibitions I’ve ever seen. Hujar’s photographs have a sublime stillness, they evoke a devastating sense of presence. The quality and consistency of the prints allow the viewer to flow from one image to the next, without being interrupted by questions of form. His photographs show life made visible by the presence of death: sex and death, friendship and death, love and death, awareness and death. As his friend Susan Sontag wrote in her diary in 1976: “Death is the opposite of everything.” …
…Inspired by this ecstatic encounter, I got in touch with the co-curator, John Douglas Millar, who kindly agreed to speak to me about Hujar and the exhibition. ‘
“NS-You’ve co-curated this exhibition and are currently writing a biography of Hujar, I am curious about the extent to which the exhibition is a way of shining a light on his life in a particular way.
JDM- Absolutely. The top floor of the exhibition is all about 1976. The room that contains the contact sheets and the images from Easter Sunday, those two rooms and the David Wojnarowicz Sex Series piece. That is basically the first chapter of the book. You can follow Hujar around Manhattan on Easter Sunday 1976. He begins uptown shooting the faithful on the steps of Saint Patrick’s on 50th and 5th. Then moves down to the West Side piers where he shoots this very ebullient queer scene, and then at the end of the day he ascends the World Trade Center and takes a photo that scans across the East River, catches the edge of the Lower East Side and the cruising grounds around the decommissioned naval docks in Brooklyn. It’s a remarkable day. And in those contact sheets you can see Marsha P Johnston, Stephen Varble, Camille O’Grady and others. It’s very rich, inherently novelistic really.
Downstairs is much more of an associative hang that was done in situ. Gary Schneider [the other co-curator] and I worked for two years on which images were going to go into the show, so we really had a feel for these particular images before installing them.”
“NS-There is a timeless quality to this work. The only image in the exhibition that feels trapped in time is the political poster.
JDM-Yes, and that was done as a favour. I don’t think he would’ve counted that as part of his oeuvre necessarily.
NS-It feels like queer culture is increasingly being absorbed into the mainstream. You’ve got the Leigh Bowery show opening this weekend, Drag Race, Derek Jarman in Glasgow, and most contemporary art exhibitions I see … I’m curious how normies utilise this stuff. For instance, as someone who is interested in Walter Benjamin, do you think cruising is an extension of the flâneur’s way of exploring the world?
JDM-When I originally started thinking about a book on Hujar, I thought he would almost stand in as a Baudelaire figure, as Baudelaire had been for Walter Benjamin. When I was saying I wanted to do a materialist history of that period in New York—or sometimes I think of it as a Balzacian approach—that has to do with being worried about versions of historicization of that period. It’s a positive that certain histories are being discovered and presented and so on, but I think there are risks in how that happens.
There were questions about the David Wojnarowicz exhibition at the Whitney in 2018. ACT UP were protesting outside because they felt that it was historicizing work in which there was still an ongoing struggle, saying isn’t it great that America got over AIDS. I would hate to think that the exhibition at Raven Row did that. At the same time, how do you—to use Benjamin’s term—make the work detonate in the present? It’s a complex question.”
“Peter Hujar — Eyes Open in the Dark closed on 6 April 2025.
Nude Opera: A Life of Peter Hujar is due to be published by Fitzcarraldo in 2029.”
By Will Ferreira Dyke published 27 March 2025 for The World of Interiors
“When I think of Peter Hujar’s work, one image leaps – both figuratively and literally – to mind: a 1974 self-portrait, where the artist is caught mid-flight in his East Village loft. There’s an uncanniness to this image. Beautiful, yet utterly bizarre. In the middle of the frame, in the middle of his apartment, Hujar is suspended hailing a militant salute. Despite his near-balletic pose, his shirt remains creaseless, neatly tucked into non-stretch denim. Hujar’s stillness is undermined by the shabbiness of his surroundings. The floor is scuffed, the rugs dishevelled and the walls still half-painted. This once grubby loft, located at 189 Second Avenue, has since given way to luxury apartments in a post-gentrified Manhattan. But in the 1970s it was filled by the milieu of subcultural refusal.
Perched atop the former Eden Theatre, the loft boasts an impressive lineage of underground tenants. Hujar moved in during the 1970s, when artists started to inhabit the crumbling, crime-infested, arson-prone Big Apple. During this time, the idea of a chic downtown was unthinkable to the artists, poets, off-Broadway performers and drag queens who called it home. Hujar took over the occupancy from Jackie Curtis, the performer and Andy Warhol ‘superstar’ celebrated in the Lou Reed song Walk on the Wild Side.
After his premature Aids-related death in 1987, Hujar left the loft to his dear friend and fleeting lover, the artist David Wojnarowicz, who lived there for the remaining five years of his unjustly abbreviated life. He too died from Aids, in 1992, at the age of 37.
A decade earlier, in 1982, Wojnarowicz painted his now-famous cow motif in the intersection of East 12th Street and Second Avenue for Hujar’s amusement. It could be seen from the loft’s beautifully arched, albeit curtainless, sash windows, which wrap around the building. While no definitive floor plan exists, contact sheets from Hujar’s archive at the Morgan Library hint at its arrangement. These thumbnails show a charming, high-ceilinged, almost grand apartment that today would fetch an inconceivable price. The loft was filled with mismatched furniture: a daybed and, by the largest window, both a piano and a harpsichord; a self-portrait tacked to the wall and a lit cigarette in the ashtray.
Hujar didn’t just inhabit the space; rather, it was the very nexus of his artistic output. He used it not only as a studio to capture his intimate portraits but also to create them, in his in-built darkroom. From conception to production, it all happened in the loft. All stages of the cross, cradle through grave. In an interview, he explained how he used ‘the same wall, the same floor’ in his photographs, but that in each image ‘the place is different […] it’s a whole different time [and] temperature’. Hujar’s apartment served as the backdrop, scenery and stage for his tender portraits of friends in repose, including Paul Thek, Fran Lebowitz, Cookie Mueller, Vince Aletti and Susan Sontag. Twenty years senior to most of his contemporaries, he was considered a pied piper to this subculture. Virtually everybody in the East Village would have spent time at his blue kitchen table, the corner of which is detectable on the contact sheet thumbnails.” – Will Ferreira Dyke
“This is the first exhibition to take on the full breadth of Peter Hujar’s later photography. Hujar was a central figure in the downtown scene of 1970s and early 80s New York, but at his death in 1987 from AIDS-related pneumonia his work was largely unknown to a broader art world. Now it is widely admired for its austere elegance and emotional charge.
Hujar’s principal concern was with forms of portraiture – of his friends and denizens of the downtown scene, whom he encountered on the street, shot in his apartment studio or sought out backstage. He also turned his attention to animals, whom he photographed with particular empathy, as well as to architectural, landscape and street photography. Eyes Open in the Darkconcentrates on his later work, when his emergence from a debilitating depression in 1976 brought about a new expansiveness. The exhibition also reveals the darkening tone of his photography in the early 1980s, as the AIDS crisis devastated his community, and his work entered into dialogue with the younger artist David Wojnarowicz.
Peter Hujar – Eyes Open in the Dark is curated by Hujar’s biographer John Douglas Millar, and Hujar’s close friend, the artist and master printer Gary Schneider, with Raven Row’s director Alex Sainsbury. As well as lifetime prints it will include prints of little-known works specially prepared by Gary Schneider, working closely with the artist’s Estate.
The exhibition is free to attend and open Wednesday to Sunday, 11am to 6pm, no booking required.”
By Sam Moore • 03/21/25 8:00am
‘ “Eyes Open in the Dark,” another Hujar retrospective at Raven Row in London, shows Hujar’s work alongside images of the artist made by his contemporaries, including an almost cubist grid portrait by Paul Thek and images of Hujar on his deathbed taken by Wojnarowicz. Through this artistic communion, Hujar and those in his inner circle are able to provide us with a kind of lineage, a way to place ourselves within a timeline of queer art and artists ruptured by the AIDS crisis. In contrast to this, Hamad Butt, the subject of “Apprehensions,” a retrospective at IMMA in Dublin, moves away from solid and recognizable images of the past. Butt’s work was more explicitly informed by the AIDS crisis and his own diagnosis in 1987; in a video where the artist is interviewed by his younger brother Jamal, Hamad reveals that he was “unable to express what [he] really wanted to say because of the limitations of painting.” While Butt’s work is no less of a document of a time and community ravaged by the AIDS crisis, his work offers a much less material world for us to grieve, instead trying to capture a precarious landscape through more abstract forms or those that foreground Butt’s own proximity to death.’
“What might bring these artists together isn’t just the way in which, in vastly different visual languages, they show a world that came undone under the shadow of death and plague, but instead, questions of memory: how is it we can remember what’s been lost? Whether intentionally or not, there’s a moment in “Apprehensions” that echoes Hujar’s practice. When Hamad is being interviewed by his brother, he lies on the sofa as if he were posing for a Hujar portrait, offering up a part of himself to us as if it were the easiest thing in the world. Butt’s work understands how fragile and precarious things are, showing them in real-time through ambitious, unsettling installations. It’s these moments, where whatever space there might be between life and death feels so thin that we might be able to glimpse through it if we try hard enough, that Hujar seems to freeze in time. So much of his work is dedicated to the moments of life that are lived in between. This can be seen in his images of performers—Hujar’s images from Italy capture the transience and transformation of live performance like little else—and landscapes; in one of the final rooms of the Raven Row is a series of Hujar’s photos of the Hudson River, the portraits and faces that we so often associate with his work are gone, and we are asked to reckon with the realities of absence and what we can do with the empty spaces left behind.”
March 25, 2025, Text by Emily Steer
“Born in New York in 1933, Sontag spent her professional life writing essays, novels, and short stories. She was also a political activist, publicly protesting the Vietnam War and basing her formidable cultural critiques on real-life visits to war zones, from Hanoi to Sarajevo. It has been over two decades since her death, but her writing is timelier than ever. Her ideas anticipated the flood of images that now proliferate the digital world, to which we have become ever more numb.
This spring, Sontag is being celebrated by two German institutions, with Susan Sontag: Seeing and Being Seen running at Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn until 28 September, and Susan Sontag: Everything Matters opening at Literaturhaus München on May 23. “
“While no photographic evidence exists of the first encounter between Peter Hujar (1934–1987) and David Wojnarowicz (1954–1992)—only anecdotes from a gay bar in downtown Manhattan—numerous images of the two artists can be seen in an exhibition at Raven Row in London. Eyes Open in the Dark, a survey of Hujar’s later work co-curated by his close friend and master printer Gary Schneider, his biographer John Douglas Millar, and gallery director Alex Sainsbury, features 130 prints including eight newly printed, never-before-seen works.
The show foregrounds intimacy and artistry across subjects that range from lustful cruising piers and skylines to tender and playful portraits of animals and personalities of 1970s New York. Three prints—Self-Portrait (1975), David Wojnarowicz (II) (1981), and Dead Gull (1985)—eloquently attest to Hujar and Wojnarowicz’s profound bond. “
“In the mid-eighties, Hujar and Wojnarowicz would visit desolate sites in New Jersey. During one exploration through an abandoned railway yard, Wojnarowicz found a lifeless gull. Lifting it up by its wings, he turned to Peter with a grin before positioning the bird for Hujar’s lens. The resulting Dead Gull invokes Albrecht Dürer‘s watercolour Wing of a European Roller (1512), a print of which Hujar kept above a mirror in his loft, and later by his hospital bed as he died of AIDS-related pneumonia in 1987. Standing beside Hujar in the hospital, Wojnarowicz described, ‘This body of my friend on the bed, the body of my brother, my father, my emotional link to the world.’ He designed Hujar’s gravestone with his name, dates, and a reproduction of the Dürer wing.”
