Tuesday's parting Instagram post

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project (@nyclgbtsites)

The Ukrainian Museum revisits the early work of East Village-based photographer Peter Hujar

Peter Hujar, Young Self Portrait (IV), 1958 

Courtesy The Ukrainian Museum/©The Peter Hujar Archive

The Ukrainian Museum on Sixth Street presents 75 photographs that feature some of the earliest work of iconic East Village-based photographer Peter Hujar (1934-1987). 

Here's more via the Museum: 

He was born to an immigrant family, and his Ukrainian grandmother raised him exclusively in the Ukrainian language until he was 5 years old. His difficult and unstable upbringing in a troubled household influenced his artistry and vision significantly as Hujar turned to a career in photography. 

And... 

The life and art of Peter Hujar were synonymous with a downtown New York that no longer exists. From the 1960s through the 1980s, the East Village was an urban buffet of creativity and danger, yet always vibrant and inexpensive. Private by nature, combative in manner, well-read, and widely connected, Hujar inhabited a world of the known and unknown.

This exhibition at the Ukrainian Museum will feature 75 of Hujar’s earliest photographs — from 1955 until 1969. Portraits, country landscapes, and city life will be the focus of the exhibition. Yet, three important vectors or series that appeared in his work during this period will also be highlighted in-depth for the first time: the Southbury (1957), the Florence (1958), and the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo (1963).

"Peter Hujar: Rialto" opens tomorrow (May 2) and will be displayed through Sept. 1. 

The Ukrainian Museum, located at 226 E. Sixth St. between Second Avenue and Cooper Square, is open Wednesday through Sunday from noon to 6 p.m. (Several members-only events related to the exhibition are also available here.) 

Hujar died of AIDS-related pneumonia in 1987. He was 53.

Hujar lived and worked above the Louis N. Jaffe Art Theater (today, the Village East by Angelika) on Second Avenue at 12th Street. Read more about the space where Jackie Curtis and David Wojnarowicz lived before and after Hujar right here.

Peter Hujar will get his 'Day' in upcoming film

Ben Whishaw to star in Ira Sachs’ new biopic of photographer Peter Hujar https://t.co/yYANYWazrW pic.twitter.com/vkzsQ58dCB

— Dazed (@Dazed) January 11, 2024

A biopic of the late East Village-based artist-photographer Peter Hujar is in the works... Deadline first reported that Ben Whishaw has the lead in the film directed by director Ira Sachs (the two worked together in the 2023 release "Passages.")

Per Dazed: 

"Peter Hujar's Day" – which had apparently been scheduled to begin shooting in November 2023 but was delayed due to last year's strikes – will... be an "intimate" film about the renowned photographer. Hujar’s story promises to make a compelling film. He lived as he worked – unflinching, unsqueamish and uncompromising, equally drawn to the stark beauty of the human condition as he was to the danger of the abandoned West Side Hudson River piers (a notorious cruising location). 

Hujar lived and worked above the Louis N. Jaffe Art Theater (today, the Village East by Angelika) on Second Avenue at 12th Street. Read more about the space where Jackie Curtis and David Wojnarowicz lived before and after Hujar right here.

And you're interested in more on the subject... "Peter Hujar's Day" is also a book that contains a transcript of a conversation between Hujar and Linda Rosenkrantz. Per the description: Rosenkrantz asked Hujar to write down everything he did one day on Dec. 18, 1974. 

A highly recommended book.

 

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Jen Fisher (@vortexity_jen_fisher)

Thoughts on the 'riveting retrospective' of Peter Hujar's work at the Morgan Library & Museum

Peter Hujar, the subject of a riveting retrospective @MorganLibrary, deserves to be better-known says @deborahsolo. Her review. https://t.co/nVcO4c1AOO

— WNYC 🎙 (@WNYC) February 16, 2018

An excerpt from Deborah Solomon's review at WNYC:

A photographer who specialized in tender black-and-white portraits of his friends along with the less likely subjects of cows and other farm animals, he was one of the essential chroniclers of the East Village scene in the ‘70s and early ‘80s. Many of his photographs pay undisguised homage to taut male bodies, reflecting a time of when Stonewall had brought a sense of freedom and AIDS had not yet descended. You can say that he made beautiful, optically pristine photographs about a scene on the verge of vanishing.

The Morgan Library & Museum is open:
Tuesday through Thursday: 10:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Friday: 10:30 a.m. to 9 p.m.
Saturday: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Sunday: 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.

The Peter Hujar retrospective at the Morgan Library & Museum, 225 Madison Ave. at 36th Street, is up through May 20. More details here.