The Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) has acquired 210 photographs by the Ukrainian American photographer Peter Hujar (1934-87). The acquisitions comes as the gallery’s photography department prepares to celebrate its 25th anniversary with the exhibition Collective Visions: Celebrating 25 Years of Photography (opening 7 November), which will feature around 80works chosen by the local community.
Hujar, who is best known for his black-and-white portraits, spent the bulk of his life in New York City and captured, among others, many of the figures in its thriving artistic scene from the 1960s to the 80s. The works acquired by the AGO all come from the Hujar Archive.
Peter Hujar, Constance Abernathy and Dogs, 1985. Gelatin silver print, 50.8 x 40.6 cm. Art Gallery of Ontario. Purchase, with funds from the David Yuile and Mary Hodgson Fund, 2025. © 2025 The Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, and Pace Gallery, New York. 2024/574
“In bringing these 210 works by Peter Hujar to the AGO, we afford audiences and scholars an opportunity to see the full breadth and richness of Hujar’s career and his working methods,” says Sophie Hackett, the gallery’s photography curator. “We are working on how and when to best present a fulsome group of the Hujar photographs, but nothing is firm yet. One may appear in the 25th anniversary exhibition, but we will have to wait to see how the selections unfold.”
Collective Visions will be what the AGO describes as “a departure from traditional curatorial models”. It will be up to local artists, collectors, donors, community leaders and scholars to determine what works from the gallery’s photography collection—spanning the 1840s to today and numbering more than 70,000 pieces—are included. The gallery’s founding photography curator Maia-Mari Sutnik will get the ball rolling, then each ensuing selector will choose a photo inspired by or in reaction to the one picked before, “with the photographs installed in the order in which they were chosen”, Hackett says.
Peter Hujar, Isaac Hayes (chest up), 1971. Gelatin silver print, 50.8 x 40.6 cm. Art Gallery of Ontario. Purchase, with funds from the David Yuile and Mary Hodgson Fund, 2025. © 2025 The Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, and Pace Gallery, New York. 2024/414
Featured works will be accompanied by a few words from each selector about their reasons for choosing it. “It’s a way to structure and engage members of our photography communities—we have 70,000 photographs in the AGO collection, so we needed a way to narrow the field for our participants,” Hackett says. “What better way than through a dialogue between photographs?”
Peter Hujar, Christopher Street Pier #7, 1976. Gelatin silver print, Art Gallery of Ontario. Purchase, with funds from the David Yuile and Mary Hodgson Fund, 2025. © 2025 The Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, and Pace Gallery, New York. 2024/464
Despite the formal refinement of his work and its historic value as a time capsule of a booming Lower Manhattan art scene—one that would soon be devastated by the HIV/Aids epidemic, which also claimed him—Hujar has been slow in receiving widespread recognition. Recent institutional shows, including during last year's Venice Biennale, at the Ukrainian Museum in New York City and at Raven Row in London, plus an unconventional biopic of sorts, starring Ben Whishaw, are helping to change that.
“I believe there are twin factors at play here,” Hackett says. “First, museums were slow to accept photography as a medium of artistic expression—happily, that is no longer a question. Second, Hujar was involved with the gay liberation movement in the 1960s and 70s. The understanding and appreciation of his work can in some ways be tracked to greater acceptance for 2SLGBTQ+ communities in general. With a couple of generations of scholars and curators who have grown up in the wake of that movement, it’s now possible to see how radical and formative Hujar’s vision has been.”
