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” features new works by Augustine Kofie and Erik Otto in a collaborative site-specific installation.
Kofie and Otto explore the in-between spaces of life in RECLAMATION. Kofie is recovering from the Eaton Canyon Fires on January 8, 2025, which destroyed his home, studio, library, archive, and personal art collection. This loss has deeply affected his sense of identity. In RECLAMATION, Kofie returns to his collage work using found vintage pressboard, combining colors and shapes with a futuristic style. The show reflects his strength in facing hardship and reigniting his creative spirit. Many works use his own ceriograph prints alongside modern pressboard and posterboard, similar to the vintage materials he often includes in his collages.
For Otto, RECLAMATION is a way to face grief caused by losing loved ones one after another and a personal physical struggle. Like Kofie, he struggled with his sense of identity. Creating art helped him regain passion for his work. He moved past this block by finding new ways to express deep feelings about existence. Otto gave his art new purpose, revisiting old themes but adding spontaneous methods, making his work different from before. He focused on materials, using flowing gestures and bright layers that blend colors visually. His balance of control and letting go is how he reclaims 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
