A Poignant Look Back at Peter Hujar’s Final Exhibition
Now restaged in San Francisco, Peter Hujar’s last ever exhibition at New York’s Gracie Mansion Gallery in 1986 was a vision of a future he would never live to see
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.