The Original Million Dollar Mermaid by Emily Gibson

Artistic director James McAnally, along with a curatorial ensemble that included Allison Glenn, Risa Puleo, Diya Vij, and the “public secret society” New Red Order, chose artworks in relation to a city that has faced both Indigenous displacement and racial violence, from the 1857 Dred Scott case to the 2014 murder of Michael Brown by Ferguson police. Its second iteration features thirty commissioned artworks spread throughout the city. Louis–based triennial Counterpublic, founded in 2019. But as he also points out, the public is a dominant community that excludes subaltern groups who must form “counterpublics” to create alternative forms of community and discourse to survive the onslaught of structural oppression that the public produces. What is a public? According to the literary critic Michael Warner, it is a relation between strangers bound together by law, belief, or shared experience. In the only extensive interview he gave, conducted by his sometime lover and protégé David Wojnarowicz, almost the first thing he says is that he will not discuss.

He granted very few interviews, and in those he did allow he is a bristling, sprung, nervous subject, evasive to the point of embarrassment.

On the single occasion he was invited to speak before an audience he failed to prepare and froze at the lectern. He wrote almost nothing about his photography for publication. For reasons in part attributable to his difficult childhood-his father left before he was born, his mother was an irascible and sometimes abusive drinker who left him with his Ukrainian immigrant grandparents for the first years of his life-Hujar refused paternalism of any kind, either toward himself or his work, and he maintained an ascetic, almost Beckettian attitude toward speaking on behalf of either.

One explanation for this is the limited primary material available Hujar was coterie-famous in his lifetime, but never garnered the exposure that would generate a significant body of contemporary criticism. The critical literature on the photographer Peter Hujar’s work remains relatively slight, and that of value slighter still.

The Original Million Dollar Mermaid by Emily Gibson