Week One: What Little Becomes Canonical. Or, Doesn't.
I first stepped into the Morgan Library & Museum with a job to do. Prior to this step, I'd only ever glimpsed the library's famed ornate reading room on a mentor's Instagram feed. I understood the Morgan to be an institution of canons, of antique materials whose significance to Western culture and curiosity would not be contested. Banners for the new Thoreau and James shows greeted me at the entrance.
But for my job, I wouldn't be working with rare books and journals, nor 18th and 19th century paintings. As a summer curatorial fellow in the photography department, my archive exists in 1970s negatives, all belonging to an elusive Downtown NYC photographer: Peter Hujar.
Acquired by Joel Smith, Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photography at the Morgan, the Peter Hujar Collection contains 650 images, original contact sheets, logbooks, and some correspondence materials. Often publicly overshadowed by his peers in the field--most notably Robert Mapplethorpe--Hujar maintained a quiet and remarkable influence in New York's Downtown art and LGBT scenes, and in the art world more broadly. Peter Hujar: Speed of Light, Joel Smith's exhibition, is the first scholarly retrospective of Peter Hujar, making the Morgan Library a crucial destination for future research on Hujar, as well as New York photography in the 1970s moment.
The Peter Hujar Collection is as new to the Morgan Library as the Morgan is new to me. Joel Smith is the institution's first curator of photography, enhancing both the medium and period scope of the museum. Working with Joel for only a week now, I have been fascinated by the kinds of questions that open up when we approach an under-researched late 20th century photographer from the vantage point of his archive, his relationships, his logbooks, his negatives, and even the gaps left by what we cannot know.
Thrust right into a new scholarly collection in the field of photography and a new direction for the Morgan Library, I'm reintroduced to the purpose of a cultural institution at all: to examine and enrich. I don't intend to romanticize the role of such institutions in society. The nature of "culture" and cultural "stuff" within most U.S. institutions bears troubling entwinements with imperialism, racism, and classism. Such fraught dynamics re-emphasize, for me, the practices of research and exhibiting as the work of cultural significance. What do I want people to notice, to remember? How do art and aesthetics function in the life of an individual and a collective, the life of a city, or the life of a feeling? As a PhD student, I often repress these types of bare and big questions. And yet, these questions are the subtext of any art/cultural institution. These are the questions that museums both present and try to answer (for better or worse, depending on how it's done).
Confession: I did not know about Peter Hujar until I applied for the ArtTable fellowship. I did not know who Peter Hujar was until Joel assigned me to a stack of catalogs and books, the few that expound on Hujar at all. Frankly, I still do not know who Peter Hujar is--there's some knowing that the archive and the photographs will never be able to achieve, no matter how much I research. Like me when I first stepped into the Morgan for this job last week, most visitors do not know Hujar and might only ever know of Hujar's body of work through exhibitions and essays. So, if curatorial work is the practice then it is also an end. This sobering, and only partially self-aggrandizing conclusion is starting to set in for me as I pursue what I thought would be a fairly painless task: writing exhibition labels.
"With labels," Joel explained, "we communicate the most straight-forward things about what we know--or the little we know."
(Photo: "Man at the Piers," 1979, Peter Hujar. Fraenkel Gallery.)