Peter Hujar

Peter Hujar, Portraits in Life and Death (New York, 1976), pl. 17

Peter Weiermai, ed., Peter Hujar (Schaffhausen, 1981), pl. 51

Urs Stahel and Hripsimé Visser, eds., Peter Hujar: A Retrospective (Zurich, 1994), p. 78 (variant)

Jeffrey Fraenkel, Dawn Troy, and Daniel Cheek, Eye of the Beholder: Photographs from the Collection of Richard Avedon (San Francisco, 2006), pl. 5

Ann Wilson is a sculpture and textile artist best known for her time spent as a member of the inadvertently established Artists of the Coenties Slip group. During the 1950’s and 1960’s, several artists took up residence in the then-deserted sailmaking lofts at Coenties Slip on the tip of lower Manhattan, attracted by the remote environment, high ceilings, and natural light afforded by broad warehouse windows. Wilson and her fellow Coenties Slip residents (including Agnes Martin, Ellsworth Kelly, James Rosenquist, Robert Indiana, and Jack Youngerman) didn’t seek to show their work together during their time spent living downtown, but rather coexisted collaboratively, and were enmeshed in the fabric of each others lives and work. In the 1970’s, Wilson went on to collaborate with painter Paul Thek, and is credited with having been influential to the early performance pieces by Robert Wilson.

By the time Hujar made this image of Wilson in 1975, the Coenties Slip artists had moved out of their studio spaces, but their work had recently been reunited by students from the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study program, who mounted the exhibition “Nine Artists/Coenties Slip” just a year prior, in 1974. The Whitney would go on to acquire one of Wilson’s early quilt paintings from this very show, a 1957 work entitled Moby Dick, which she made while in residence at the Coenties Slip.

There is another print of Hujar’s image of Wilson in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art.