Subterranean Monuments: Burckhardt, Johnson, Hujar

Painter-photographer-filmmaker Rudy Burckhardt, eccentric polymath Ray Johnson, and photographer Peter Hujar were united in this exhibition that traced the changing life of bohemia in postwar Manhattan. Working within an intensely creative community of peers, all three of these figures came to affect the art world well beyond the focused compass of their lives. Burckhardt's cityscapes, storefront studies, and portraits were displayed, as were paintings reflecting a life alternating between urban and rural phases. Johnson turned a personal conflict between secretive and manically social impulses into a massive oeuvre of correspondence art and mixed-media constructions that paint an idiosyncratic group portrait of their era. Hujar, a quintessential downtown artist, divided his fierce concentration between the revelatory possibilities of the camera portrait and the younger creative figures he mentored; in both respects, he quietly helped define the art's evolution in New York since the 1970s.

Viewers were invited to look beneath the surface of the art to discover the myriad associations and parallels that tie these artists together. By juxtaposing Burckhardt's, Johnson's, and Hujar's works, this exhibition offered a rare opportunity to examine their analogous lives, providing a glimpse of life in postwar New York from three very distinct points of view, without the self-consciousness of the mainstream or the burden of fame. Organized at Vassar, the exhibition and its publication were made by possible by the generous support of The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation. There are works that appeared in this exhibition that were loans to the Loeb and therefore do not appear on this website.