SF Art Events: Week of 09.07.25
THING ONE: Peter Hujar: The Gracie Mansion Show Revisited
Diana Vreeland
Sep 4–Oct 25, 2025
Opening Saturday, Sept. 13th
In Peter Hujar: The Gracie Mansion Show Revisited, Fraenkel Gallery recreates the now-legendary exhibition that took place in New York’s East Village in 1986, one year before the artist’s death. For the show, Gracie Mansion Gallery presented 70 photographs including portraits of friends and fellow artists, nudes, landscapes, and pictures of animals and abandoned buildings. Hung in a long grid two rows high, the exhibition freely mixed genres and subjects, creating a sequence that encouraged multiple associations. Fraenkel Gallery’s new exhibition presents a version of the original 1986 layout, offering contemporary viewers a chance to experience Hujar’s work as he conceived it. This will be Fraenkel Gallery’s sixth exhibition of Hujar’s work since 2002. The gallery will hold a public reception for the show and a concurrent exhibition Katy Grannan: Mad River on Saturday, September 13, from 2-4pm.
The 1986 exhibition, titled Peter Hujar: Recent Photographs, was the artist’s eighth and final solo show. Before his death, Hujar was recognized for his extraordinary photographs by a small but influential group in downtown New York that included avant-garde artists, writers, and performers, a circle that often overlapped with his portrait subjects. By the time of the show, his work had been featured in solo exhibitions in New York and Europe, and he had published one catalogue and his only book, Portraits in Life and Death. Gallerist Gracie Mansion organized the exhibition with Sur Rodney (Sur), at the suggestion of Hujar’s close friend, artist David Wojnarowicz. The gallery had included Hujar’s work in group shows, but Recent Photographs was his first solo exhibition since 1981. Following a difficult period, Hujar had perhaps hoped for sales as the market for photography began to grow, but very few photographs sold. While the show was not a commercial success, the opening reception drew an enthusiastic crowd, followed by an after-party in the Mike Todd Room at the Palladium nightclub. “Looking back to his show, it drew so many of the New York luminaries,” recalls Mansion. “Peter was a star. The show was a triumph.”
LOCATION: Fraenkel Gallery, 49 Geary Street, 4th Floor, San Francisco, CA (map)
HOURS: Tuesday–Friday, 10:30am–5:30pm, Saturday, 11am–5pm
Thing two: Reclamation: a collaborative site-specific installation featuring Augustine Kofie + Erik Otto
Reclamation installation: Augustine Kofie and Erik Otto
ONGOING - September 18, 2025
By Appointment
“RECLAMATION” is open for viewing now through September 18. To book an appointment, click the link in our bio. This exhibition is a duo show presenting new works by Augustine Kofie, @keepdrafting & Erik Otto, @erikottostudio + a collaborative site-specific installation.
Heron Arts is pleased to present RECLAMATION, a duo exhibition featuring about forty artworks by Augustine Kofie and Erik Otto. The opening reception is August 23rd, 2025 from 6-9pm. It is free and open to the public. The exhibition will be on view until September 18th, by appointment only.
Kofie & Otto investigate liminal planes of our existence within RECLAMATION. Kofie is currently rebounding from the devastating Eaton Canyon Fires that affected most of Altadena back in January 8, 2025. Because of this unforeseen inferno, he lost his home, studio, library, personal archive and shrine to everything he loves about art and media. Kofie is still coping with an identity chasm due to this natural disaster. For RECLAMATION, Kofie is reviving his collage-based practice which employs heaps of found vintage pressboard, curating colors and shapes with a futurist aesthetic. This exhibition highlights his resilience, experiencing such a terrible tribulation only to spring back into his creative passion and begin collecting and creating again. Many of the pieces in RECLAMATION use his own materials made from ceriograph printing, while also using contemporary pressboard and posterboard, similar to the types of vintage packaging he is known for in his collages.
For Otto, RECLAMATION is a reckoning with grief induced by a sequential loss of loved ones and a personal incident that affected him physically. Like Kofie, Otto felt stumped identity-wise. Through the act of creating, he found himself rediscovering enthusiasm for his practice. Otto emerged from this stagnation by finding new pathways to express this intense wave of existentialism. He found a new intention in his practice, engaging with similar themes from before but also incorporating improvisational approaches, allowing for a finished product that contrasts with his early work. Otto focused on being material-forward, flowing with gestural marks and allowing for luminous layers to optically blend an array of hues. His exploration of control and release are his own reclamation of his artistic voice.
LOCATION: Heron Arts, 7 Heron St., San Francisco, CA (map)
HOURS: By appointment only
THINGS THREE: Daydream in Memories of Youth &
Grammar of Possiblity
Stephanie Duprie Routh
Out of Body Experience, 2021/25
September 5 – 27
Fox Projects, an independent curatorial platform recently launched by SLATE contemporary Co-Director Danielle Fox, is pleased to announce the opening of Daydream in Memories of Youth & The Grammar of Possibility, on view at Minnesota Street Projects in San Francisco, September 5 through 27.
The multi-media exhibition will be anchored by Daydream in Memories of Youth, a series of nineteen photographs by acclaimed Austin-based artist Stephanie Duprie Routh, exploring memory, nostalgia, identity, sensuality, and the folding of time. In these pictures of (mainly but not exclusively) young women, Routh explores her own nostalgia for a time when sensuality was part of her identity and power in the world. As curator Danielle Fox observes:
“Routh’s approach to her subjects shows them as human beings with complex embodied feelings, including private feelings that may include, among many other things, vulnerability, sensuality, desire, a desire to be desired, a need for intimacy and belonging, and for being seen. Their role as the protagonists of their own stories defies simple objectification, and the layered and sometimes puzzling complexity of the photos draws viewers in to witness and even participate in a multitude of unfolding dramas.”
LOCATION: 1275 Minnesota Street, Gallery 107, San Francisco, CA (map)
HOURS: Tuesdays–Saturdays 12–5pm
