"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."
"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."
Recent Photographs was a mid-career survey of 70 silver gelatin prints including portraits, nudes, landscapes, animals, and abandoned buildings arranged in a two-row grid. The selection combined intimate portraits of figures such as Charles James, Ethyl Eichelberger, Diana Vreeland, and Peggy Lee with portraits from the Mental Outpatient Series of Black men made in 1981 after deinstitutionalisation. Hujar presented an egalitarian vision that linked beauty and mortality, rejecting commercial trappings and aligning with fellow avant-garde artists like David Wojnarowicz and dealer Gracie Mansion. The exhibition anticipated photography's elevation into a central cultural language and mirrored the East Village artist-run ethos.
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