Fraenkel Gallery’s 2025 show recreates one of the most significant exhibitions of Peter Hujar’s lifetime, the 1986 presentation of 70 photographs at Gracie Mansion Gallery in New York’s East Village, titled Peter Hujar: Recent Photographs. Like the original, Fraenkel Gallery’s exhibition comprises long grids of photographs stacked two rows high, where genres and subjects mix freely and encourage multiple associations.
Gallerist Gracie Mansion recalls the reaction to the show’s wide-ranging subjects, which included nudes, natural and industrial landscapes, and images of animals. “I think people knew Peter mostly by his portraits and this was a revelation for some,” she says. With the show, Hujar was also introduced “to a new and broader audience.” The show is still legendary today, nearly forty years later. Recalling its opening night, “Peter was a star,” says Mansion. “The show was a triumph.” We take a closer look at some of the subjects Hujar selected, how he presented them, and what he hoped to accomplish with the show.
The double-hung row of photographs in the 1986 exhibition opened with these two works, facing viewers on the right as they entered the gallery on Avenue A. As documented by installation photographs and checklists, Hujar intended the frieze of images to be read from right to left, counterclockwise through the space. To start, he paired a soulful, dark-eyed cow with a portrait of Sophie Thoko Mgcina and Thuli Dumakude, performers in the South African play The Long Journey of Poppie Nongena, which had traveled to New York in 1982.
Hujar included a portrait of David Wojnarowicz, one of the most important people in his life. Hujar met Wojnarowicz around 1980, and encouraged his work as an artist. After a brief romantic relationship, he eventually became a close friend and mentor. “Everything I made, I made for Peter,” Wojnarowicz once remarked. By the mid-1980s, Wojnarowicz’s work had been featured in a number of solo exhibitions in downtown galleries, including Gracie Mansion Gallery. Wojnarowicz encouraged Mansion to organize Recent Photographs, which was Hujar’s first solo show since 1981 and the last during his lifetime.
Along with the avant-garde artists, writers, and performers who were often his friends, Hujar photographed people outside of his downtown sphere. This image and another, Man in Woods (I), 1981, are from a series depicting mental health outpatients.
A notice for the show in The Village Voice listed some of the show’s subjects: “Dead cats and sleeping dogs, turkeys, geese, snakes and babies, tatooed [sic] feet, and scarred stomachs, wrinkled faces, and poor Jackie Curtis laid-out make up this eclectic retrospective of portraits in life and death.” Gary Indiana, who had previously posed for Hujar, also wrote a critical review in The Village Voice. But otherwise the exhibition received little press.
Hujar placed a portrait of fashion editor Diana Vreeland directly over a close-up showing the feet of Australian artist and dancer Vali Meyer. In an essay published by Jeu de Paume on the occasion of the 2016 retrospective exhibition Peter Hujar: Speed of Life, art historian Marcelo Gabriel Yáñez writes, “What connected the images together and made the grid so effective was a distinct vision of the entire world mixed up.”
Hujar included several photographs of artist Greer Lankton, whose visceral doll sculptures were included in the landmark 1981 exhibition New York/New Wave at P.S. 1 in Queens. Her work was featured in shows at the East Village gallery Civilian Warfare, where David Wojnarowicz had also shown his work, and at Gracie Mansion Gallery.
A handful of people appear repeatedly in the sequence, including actor, writer, and director John Heys. A portrait of Heys in profile hung diagonally across from Diana Vreeland, who Heys famously resembled and later channeled in performance, creating a winking connection between images.
Photographer Lynn Davis, another friend, appears in three photographs, as does drag performer, playwright, and actor Ethyl Eichelberger, who is pictured in and out of costume.
Rather than comparing his subjects with each other, Hujar was determined to see the singularity in each. In one section of the grid, he includes artist, critic, and curator Nicolas Moufarrege, who had passed away the year before from AIDS-related causes; actor Black Eyed Susan, who performed in productions from La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club and Ridiculous Theatrical Company and often collaborated with Ethyl Eichelberger; and Chloe Finch, the daughter of Hujar’s good friend Linda Rosenkrantz, author of Peter Hujar’s Day.
