Archives 2024

One recent sweltering summer afternoon, photographer Ethan James Green and I escaped the heat by visiting the Ukrainian Museum in New York to see “Peter Hujar: Rialto.” In the dog days of a New York City summer, when the temperature feels like it’s rising at the kind of frenzied pace you only wish your bank balance could match, the museum is quite the refuge from those steamy streets. (It still can be: “Peter Hujar: Rialto” runs until the beginning of September.)

Of course, the real reason to visit is to see Hujar’s incredible work. One could lavish all sorts of superlatives on the Ukrainian-American photographer, who passed away in 1987, and he would be worthy of all of them. Hujar, a titan of photographic practice, could be unvarnished and direct, but also possessed a very tender way of capturing whoever and whatever was in front of him—a singular marriage of tender intimacy and an unflinching look at humanity.

Hujar is best known for his work depicting LGBTQIA+ icons and iconography, from Candy Darling on Her Death Bed, 1973 to Christopher Street Pier #2 (Crossed Legs), 1976. “I love his work, and think that when it comes to gay and queer photographers, he’s one of the best,” Green told me. “When he was coming up, so was Robert Mapplethorpe—and it was like Mapplethorpe was so much about being abstract with his subjects, whereas Hujar is about getting the person in a very raw way. I prefer that approach—especially in portraiture.”

Yet the brilliance of “Peter Hujar: Rialto” is that it reveals work of Hujar’s that is much less familiar. What’s on view here spans a period from 1955 to 1969—just over a decade of images, but one in which Hujar captured the world slowly starting to shift on its axis towards what seemed like a more progressive era. That’s true whether he was in rural America or in the spooky Capuchin catacombs of Palermo, with city kids on the streets, or meeting some of the future icons who would go on to ignite the 1970s—Iggy Pop, Warhol superstar Jackie Curtis, and Loulou de la Falaise, who worked with Yves Saint Laurent, et al.

“I’m seeing a lot of images I haven’t seen before,” Green said that afternoon. “You tend to forget that he’s a photographer who was shooting for a good amount of time, and there was just so much work. You realize when someone passes that certain images stay and others maybe slip away—and that has nothing to do with how good they are.”

Walter Hill’s 1979 film The Warriors, based on the 1965 novel by Sol Yurick, presents a blood-stained map of a New York City ruled by highly territorial gangs.

Warriors, a new concept album based on the same story, begins with a dancehall-tinged intro by the Jamaican singer Shenseea, before Bronx-born rapper Chris Rivers hops on the track to rep and introduce his borough. This sets the stage for the next four voices: Nas (of Queens), Cam’ron (Manhattan), Ghostface Killah and RZA (Staten Island), and Busta Rhymes (Brooklyn).

Soon after comes a jolting reminder that this is, in fact, a musical theater piece by Lin-Manuel Miranda, as a handful of Broadway favorites (Phillipa Soo, Amber Gray, Jasmine Cephas Jones, Aneesa Folds, Kenita Miller, Sasha Hutchings, Gizel Jiménez, and Julia Harriman) drop in, playing the gender-swapped titular gang.

But then, the ultimate blow to expectations: Lauryn Hill emerging as Cyrus, a soon-to-be-slain gang leader who proposes the clans drop their rivalries and take the city from the police, which they outnumber 3-1. While Miranda’s Hamilton Mixtape, released after the success of that 2015 musical, featured several hip-hop notables, never has his music sounded so, well, hard.

At a little after 5 p.m. last Thursday, a jury in New York found former president Donald Trump guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. Immediately, my phone was flooded with messages about the court’s ruling—from news apps, my family, friends, and coworkers. Some cheered. Others wondered if a guilty verdict really meant anything for someone like Trump. Others still expressed concern for the safety of the jurors.

I received these alerts en route to see the Atlantic Theater Company’s production of The Welkin by playwright Lucy Kirkwood. (This staging marks the work’s American debut after premiering at London’s National Theatre in 2020.) Inside the Linda Gross Theater, housed within a former church in Chelsea, the cast was warming up before their 7 p.m. curtain when the production manager rushed in to tell them the news.

“There are aware and concerned citizens in our cast,” says Sandra Oh, who appears in the play as Lizzy Luke, a defiant midwife. “There’s no way that we are not influenced by everything that is going on in the world.” And indeed as many theatergoers noted during intermission, The Welkin made for richly apt viewing while a real-world trial unfolded.

“It’s no exaggeration to say we are living in the spring of Joan Jonas,” said Randy Kennedy on Monday night at the National Arts Club. The veteran arts writer was joined onstage by Jonas, 87 years old and having a major moment, as she currently headlines not one but two shows in New York: at the Museum of Modern Art, where a riveting retrospective of her five-decade career opened in March, and at her enchanting show of works on paper at the Drawing Center in SoHo. Beyond our hallowed art institutions, her work also features on graphic tees, mirrored bags, and fringed dresses from Rachel Comey’s thrilling spring 2024 collection.

For the unfamiliar, Jonas is the visionary American artist who worked on the front lines of performance and video art starting in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Ever inventive, she developed her own language through sound, movement, visual symbols, and a relentless exploration of ideas. She incorporated folklore, ecology, and a feminist point of view, swinging from large-scale performances in the empty lots of downtown Manhattan to tender drawings of beloved pets. She has influenced generations of young artists who, like her, seek to break with artistic norms and tread new ground.

“She works at this lovely intersection that really breeds cultural diplomacy,” said Phillip Edward Spradley, who chairs the National Arts Club’s art and technology committee and who planned Monday night’s talk between Jonas and Kennedy.