Art Gallery of Ontario acquires more than 200 Peter Hujar photographs
The acquisition comes as the museum’s photography department prepares to celebrate its 25th anniversary
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.”