A Hard Stare:

Peter Hujar, Paul Thek, and Their Circle on Film

 

Apr 21–25, 2026

MoMA

 

Passport photos of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek, 1962. © The Peter Hujar Archive/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, DACS, London

 

On the occasion of the publication of Andrew Durbin’s dual biography "The Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek", we present a four-day screening program of work shaped by the legacies of these two artists.

 

The series includes footage of and by Peter Hujar and Paul Thek—alongside works by such friends and contemporaries as Gregory J. Markopoulos, Gary Schneider, Susan Sontag, and Andy Warhol. Over four evenings, Durbin will join writers, filmmakers, and curators in conversation about the many entanglements that defined Hujar and Thek’s underappreciated careers from the early 1960s to the late 1980s. This program and Durbin’s publication elucidate the complex, transnational, and radical ambitions of two artists, friends, lovers, and cultural figureheads who changed art in the second half of the 20th century.

 

 

FILM

 

#Thanks for Le Temps Perdu: Hujar, Thek, Warhol

Followed by a conversation with Andrew Durbin

Tue, Apr 21, 7:00 p.m./ Wed, Apr 22, 4:30 p.m.

 

#Galaxie. 1966. Directed by Gregory J. Markopoulos

Introduced by Andrew Durbin

Wed, Apr 22, 7:00 p.m./ Thu, Apr 23, 4:30 p.m.

 

#Salters Cottages and Peter Hujar: An Evening

with Gary Schneider and Andrew Durbin

Followed by a conversation with Gary Schneider and Andrew Durbin

Thu, Apr 23, 7:00 p.m.

 

#Duet for Cannibals. 1969. Directed by Susan Sontag

Followed by a conversation with Benjamin Moser and Andrew Durbin

Fri, Apr 24, 6:30 p.m./ Sat, Apr 25, 4:30 p.m.

https://www.moma.org/calendar/film/5898

 

 

BOOK

 

 

The Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek 

Author: Andrew Durbin

 

"As official narratives everywhere strain and crack, Peter and Paul—and Durbin—offer a desperately needed alternative way of seeing and being." —Benjamin Moser, author of Susan Sontag: Her Life and Work, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

 

"[Andrew Durbin] has made of these lives and these times a jam-packed poem in prose. It’s like a trip with these guys, without pulling tight at the ending, just death." —Eileen Myles, author of A "Working Life"

 

The cinematic, never-before-told story of two intimately entangled artists who redefined queer art.

 

When Paul Thek met Peter Hujar in the winter of 1956 in Coral Gables, Florida, a slow-simmering connection began to burn. Thek, twenty-three and living in Miami, was handsome and itching to make it as a painter; in the twenty-two-year-old Hujar, a shy, sensual photographer, he’d found a kindred spirit. By 1960, they were dating and living in New York, beginning decades of sex, love, competition, and reconciliation—an entanglement that changed American art forever.

 

Surrounded by a robust creative scene populated by Susan Sontag, Andy Warhol, Fran Lebowitz, John Waters, and David Wojnarowicz, Thek and Hujar’s profoundly influential careers, from the early 1960s through the late 1980s, differed as much as the men themselves. The unpredictable and often overlooked Thek crafted visceral installations and sculptures, while Hujar, celebrated and sociable, took penetrating portraits of his world, queer and otherwise. Yet even at their most estranged, and even after their deaths from AIDS, both men were united by a pursuit of liberation—from artistic and sexual limits, from anything short of changing the world.

 

Andrew Durbin’s The Wonderful World That Almost Was unravels, for the first time, the intertwined stories and work of two boundaryburning, paradigm-tilting, never more relevant American artists. Weaving together deft art criticism with moving portraits of both men's inner lives, and assembled with exhaustive research, Durbin’s book is an ode to a lost but still-living world—and two men who defined it.

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374609559/thewonderfulworldthatalmostwas

 

 

*피터 후자: 삶의 속도(Peter Hujar: Speed of Life)@모건라이브러리, 2018

https://www.nyculturebeat.com/?mid=Art2&document_srl=3725102