Art In: Peter Hujar at Pace

Peter Hujar, Jay and Fernando [Two Men in Leather Kissing], 1966 © The Peter Hujar Archive

Peter Hujar: Cruising Utopia, an online exhibition that brings together a selection of 20 photographs—both iconic and seldom seen—that Hujar took between 1966 and 1985, in a love letter to his city and to his community of artists and performers, poets and writers, strangers, lovers and friends. Cruising the city through his camera’s viewfinder, Hujar captured porous networks of erogenous utopias, inhabited by a fantastic and often familiar cast: the dramatis personae that defined a generation of queer culture in New York.

Peter Hujar, David Brintzenhofe Applying Makeup, 1982 © The Peter Hujar Archive

One of the most influential American photographers of the twentieth century, Hujar was at the forefront of the cultural scene in downtown New York in the years preceding the AIDS epidemic. To commemorate Hujar’s legacy during LGBTQ Pride Month, Pace Gallery and The Peter Hujar Archive will donate 10% of all sales from Cruising Utopia to the NYC AIDS Memorial, which honors the more than 100,000 New Yorkers who have died of AIDS and acknowledges the contributions of caregivers and activists who mobilized to provide care for the ill, fight discrimination, lobby for medical research, and alter the drug approval process.

The online exhibition is on view now until July 28. You can view it here

Peter Hujar,John Heys in Lana Turner's Gown (III), 1979 © The Peter Hujar Archive