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Hunter Reynolds was an artist, activist, and longtime artist member of Visual AIDS. A memorial will take place on Saturday, October 29 at 3pm at Abrons Art Center. Information is here.
He was active in ACT UP and co-founded Art Positive, an affinity group to fight homophobia and censorship in the arts. To learn about Hunter's life and legacy, read more in the New York Times and ARTnews. Hunter was an important part of the Visual AIDS family, and was honored with a Visual AIDS Vanguard Award in 2009. See Hunter's work in the Visual AIDS Artist Registry here. Read a wonderful conversation between Hunter and his dear friend Kathleen White here.
He was surrounded by a fierce and extraordinary group of friends and carers throughout life and throughout his final days. Please scroll down, and click through the slide show above to see tributes to Hunter from some of those who knew him best.
To support Hunter's legacy, Visual AIDS is offering copies of his new book, I-DEA, The Goddess Within, for sale on the Visual AIDS Store. Recently published by Artist Publications, the book features photographs of Hunter Reynolds by Maxine Henryson and an essay by Julie Ault.
In conjunction with the memorial, Hunter's gallery, P·P·O·W, is honored to present a weeklong exhibition of Hunter Reynolds’ final self-portraits, opening October 29 from 11 - 6pm on the second floor of 390 Broadway. P·P·O·W says, "For many years, Reynolds actively fought an aggressive form of skin cancer with increasingly invasive surgeries that eventually resulted in the removal of his left eye. Throughout, Reynolds painted eleven vibrant self-portraits that chart his emotional and spiritual progression, as well as his evolving physical form. Reynolds’ entire artistic life engaged with the spiritual power and aesthetic potential of transformation, and he maintained this commitment in his final works. To the end, he was compelled to make art that distilled his pain and anger into honest, vulnerable documents of the determination required to survive. Along with the decades of trenchant, transgressive work he leaves behind, these self-portraits are a testament to a legacy of activism and self-exploration that continues to challenge taboos of beauty and identity beyond Reynolds' lifetime."
Ethan Shoshan
What do you say about an artist and friend who has been through so much, demands so much, and in turn has also given you so much? He has lived through a lot in the span of his lifetime - multiple surgeries, natural disasters, the AIDS crisis, inept government care, financial constraints, mobility impairments, and cancer among others. I can’t bring myself to name them all, but using each challenge as a possible reinvention by tapping into networks of care and support, not just for himself, but for his community facing these same problems speaks to his character, that the words LONG TERM SURVIVOR resounds. That’s what it was like around Hunter, an epic journey of push and pull, persevering creativity, where each day brings a new joy and a continuing hardship to overcome.
I first met Hunter in passing at an evening of performances and personas in the summer of either 2006 or 2007 at Exit Art. I was walking down the stairs while he was walking up. Our eyes locked and he wanted to know who this strange creature was that just passed him. I was wearing a teddy bear headdress that would be known later as my friend Burt. I recognized him before I ever met him, turned around as we crossed, smiled and exchanged greetings. My friend Burt also greets him with a wiggle and shake and waves of his teddy arm. I also awkwardly blurted out that I curated him in a show without ever meeting him till now! I came across his work through the Visual AIDS archives and curated him alongside other artists who use ritual objects and clothes with healing and meditative performance as a way to transcend the constraints of the body and suffering. Even though I was in a performance costume, I was not part of the official program of the night, ironically similar to Hunter’s guerrilla drag performance actions. It was also an unexpected surprise to meet him. We exchanged contacts and made plans to get to know each other another day. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the swirling energies of our creative pursuits would be bound in multiple ways for almost 2 decades. In the last few months of his life, he would remember our initial encounter with joy and even mime it - honoring the spirit of how we physically met by wearing a unicorn on his head for my 42nd birthday… to celebrate the magic of our exchanges over the years and the spark from that first encounter.
I’ve been finding it difficult to talk or write my thoughts down about Hunter ever since he passed away in June. It’s strange to even think about all the experiences and histories we shared and how many stories and lives he lived and graced. It’s hard because I knew him in such different ways and different times in my life and it’s tough to see myself in the same way he saw me. I guess that’s why we have friends - to remind us who we are, how far we’ve come, and in a way, to make us see or want to be better versions of ourselves. In a lot of ways, it’s the difficult task of remembering, honoring, experiencing, and an awkward feeling like something is missing. That said, I’m trying to filter out myself when I talk about him because he was always much more than what we shared and experienced since we built so many things together. Most of the time, I was tasked as his tech wizard, fixing his computers and hard drives when they crashed or got inundated with spam, virus, and porn. I was also his art assistant - arranging and sewing together his collaged photo weavings as well as making some clothes for his performances. He always told me he loved the way I sewed his photos and kept telling me that I would be the one tasked to make his photo weavings even after he wasn’t around. I jokingly shrugged that aside because I didn’t want to think about him dying at all, but looking back I realize how much vision and forethought he put into things – he knew his intention and careful understanding would be realized and understood in many different ways.
I also volunteered and shared my own work in some public events with him, creating a performative social sculpture for his solo exhibition at Momenta Arts and providing him water and caring for him during some of his public mummification rituals were highlights among other experiences. He saw multiple facets of my skills and would call upon me in his various projects. He even brought me upstate to help revive an old program that was one of his dreams - a summer camp for transient queer youth - which later evolved into so much more - in terms of mentorship, year round workshops and dinners which enveloped my life for numerous years with touching collaborations. He had a special gift for seeing something in you and being able to help you develop and share it with the world. In as much as he helped, he was also more than one could handle at a time - the intensity of drive and commitment he expected from you was just as much a blessing as a curse.
I’ve been feeling almost helpless to try and unpack or understand my relationship with him because of all this, and also because the last few months of being around him was more about just being a witness and helping where I can, through gentle touch or fixing his computer problems. We didn’t speak much then - in part, because I didn’t know what to say as I saw him struggling and I just wanted to comfort him. I realize it now, that a lot of times the pain he went through is also the pain he somehow worked on through his art. When he passed, I wanted to honor his spirit and struggle and the friends around him. I created a special ritual around his body with his close friends and family - weaving the threads of art and life in a kind of blessing. I continued a tradition that I did with Geoffrey Hendricks (my mentor who also shared Hunter’s Birthday), by creating a ritual death mask collaboratively, before the funeral home picked up his body. I felt a force move through me when I did it, as if every cell in my body vibrated. It was an intense beautiful dance of emotion and creation and magic that was able to capture the spirit that Hunter so much embodied. It awakened something in me that I haven't fully processed yet - that we make art not as work but as extensions of ourselves, our lives, and as ways to contain and gently nudge the energies of the universe in a different path.
And it’s through these thoughts and memories that I want to honor him, sharing in the magic that is a testament to Hunter’s vision that we can experience through his art and friendships.
Ethan Shoshan, October 2022
Notes to Hunter Reynolds by Gail Thacker
June 20, 2022
Hey Hunter
I’m going out of my mind
how quiet it is here at home without you.
We
just dark souls on the opposite side of midnight.
Me & you.
We bonded in our pain and celebrated in our joy of the risk in the creativity of art & life.
So I’m glad I was able to arrange your last apartment above mine so we could spend your last days together like they would never end.
The Aztec two-step into the flow of our friendship & departure.
Please, respond. xx, Gail
Sept 30, 2022
Hunter,
Thinking of you.
Do you know that people are writing about you for a Visual AIDS memorial page? Isn’t that nice? I’m learning your reach is far.
You know all of this in which I write.
These letters to you I can only release into the void. Since I know there is no response coming, no camp in heaven. That the curator Frank Wagner didn’t really meet you at heaven’s door.
But I am human and know nothing, and the imagination is a wonderful thing. So I can imagine.
Right?
Right.
Love & miss you!
Gail
P.S.: Jimmy has your cats
July 28, 2022
Hey girl,
Thinking about you.
I didn’t know you when you created the musical box and the AIDS dress, but you told me stories about it. It turns like an album on a record player with you in the center with the AIDS dress on, just like the ballerina did on my jewelry box as a child.
It played a song. Which song was that? I don’t remember. p
You also told me stories about your mother and even stories that went back further to yolur father and grandfather. Remember? One story was something similar to the miniseries HOLLYWOOD, about a gas station that served queer tricks back in the day; when being queer was still in the closet, when a closet wasn’t a place to place one’s shoes. When being queer was a social poo pah. A rebellious act. A secret. Our generation changed a lot of that when we took it to the streets during the AIDS epidemic. You were on the front line. The AIDS generation. This new generation—wow, I am so proud of them. They take no shit. There is a new world coming and I wish you were here. AIDS later complicated your body’s reaction to skin cancer and took your life. What a bitch! Sorry honey. I never thought I would outlive you! Xg
July 29, 2022
Hi Hunter! Thinking of you. I never got to thank you for believing in my art and introducing me to your patrons. One, especially, who has become a dear friend.
Thank you Hunter. Xg
August 5, 2022
Hi Hunter,
Remember when we first met? We met a few times before this at the Thread Waxing Space. But the one time that cemented our friendship was when you walked right into my crumbled heart as I was in a full make-out session with my best friend in the elevator, at the Fabric Workshop and Museum. You with your mummification ritual and me with my photography under my arm. You loved sex. Ha! Remember the time I walked in on you? Bet that evening you regretted giving me your keys. Ha! But good thing I had them! Because who found you on the floor and called the ambulance?
Me!
XO Gail
August 1, 2022
Hunter!
You took risks all the time. Why?
Oh yeah, because you had 9 lives. I can’t believe it was skin cancer that took you away from us.
I remember the time when you flatlined.
When I got there you still had all these stickers scattered about your chest and body. Your chest was red from the electric shock that restarted your heart. I pulled out my Polaroid camera and took 6 long exposures to try and capture your aura after your short visit with death.
All the images had a blue aura around and on your body. Remember?
The flow of art. You ever created until you could no more. I have 2 woven pieces. I had 3. We traded one of my Polaroid prints for your red piece with the photos of candles and flesh sewn together. I lost that one. I have others, but I mourn the red one as I mourn you. Love, Gail
July 23, 2022
Hey girlfriend Patina!
We named your garden in our yard Patina du Prey’s Garden. But it felt like the building fell into a horrible state of depression since you left. The building became so quiet. My phone stopped ringing with your calls. And sorry, but when I went to P-Town for a week in a heat wave…welllll, I returned to a garden in desperate need of water. Frayed! Fried! So sorry but some of the bushes & plants died. But the morning glories that you planted for me are in full blossom! They are blue and beautiful running up the fence. Thank you for the beautiful garden, Hunter!
Missing you. XGail
Oct 2, 2022
Hey Hunter,
Many friends are still in my life, yet I feel so lonely without you. As I looked through my Polaroids and snap shots for images for your memorial, I ended up lost in our journey and sent Conrad 91 photos that I liked of you!
I have your belt hanging on my wall that we created for your performance at the Bronx Museum. My Polaroids of you on the belt hangs slightly damaged from it dragging on the bottom of your tall figure. I miss our stories. You loved to tell stories. I had forgotten how we first properly met. But you reminded me by telling stories of your life. Yet, I knew who you were and had already taken your Polaroid earlier at White Box Gallery during the Fashion performances, but you were mummified so you didn’t know until years later. Our friendship didn’t form until around 2004 and at that moment it was 1998. We were all young and busy so time flew by fast. But maybe I’m wrong.
And I remember when you formed Arts in the Woods a Queer Transient Youth Camp. You felt so strongly about issues and rights and activism. I am proud of you. You understood abuse in many forms.
Yet…What year was that?
XGail
Oct 5, 2022
Hey Hunter,
Louis, Conrad & Ethan are still in my life, yet I feel so lonely without you. As I looked through my Polaroids and snap shots for images for your memorial, I ended up lost in our journey and sent Conrad 91 photos that I liked of you!
I have your belt hanging on my wall that we created for your performance at the Bronx Museum. My Polaroids of you on the belt hang slightly damaged from dragging on the bottom of your tall figure. I miss our stories. You loved to tell stories. I had forgotten how we first properly met. But you reminded me by telling stories of your life. Yet, I knew who you were and had already taken your Polaroid earlier at White Box Gallery during the Fashion performances, but you were mummified so you didn’t know until years later. Our friendship didn’t form until around 2004 and at that moment it was 1998. We were busy so time flew by fast. But maybe I’m wrong.
And I remember when you formed Arts in the Woods a Queer Transient Youth Camp. You felt so strongly about issues and rights and activism. I am proud of you. You understood abuse in many forms.
Yet…What year was that?
XGail
Howard Grossman, MD
Hunter was a patient of mine for many years in the darkest days of the epidemic. He was always so brilliant and ahead of his time. Hunter was the first artist who asked me to draw his blood to use in his art. He was the first artist I knew who understood the power and mystery of blood and the impact it could make in highlighting what was going on with the HIV epidemic. He leaves an amazing legacy.
Chrysanne Stathacos
I am attaching one of my favourite photos - of Hunter / Patina getting ready for the Banquet with Tony Feher helping him...
put the Hair gloves on. (See slide show above.) The Banquet was a collaboration with Hunter and myself in 1992 - which is still fondly remembered today by everyone who attended.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QW2aZ0EeuY
Hunter will be missed.
Alyssa De Luccia
I first met Hunter in NYC at his opening at Simon Watson Gallery but we really bonded when we both realized that we both received an artist residency
at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. It was 1993. His studio was directly next to mine. By the time I got to KB,( I first had an artist residency at Kunst-Werke which is also in Berlin) it was a typical beautiful summer in Berlin. We often would pass each other in the hall as you were getting home and I was heading out for my morning swim at Prinzenbad. But more often we would sit in your space and drink coffee, trading stories about the evening, men, love, life and art.
Throughout our friendship we shared not only our major life events, we lived in each other's homes, exchanged art studios in Berlin and NYC and gifted our art to each other. In 2014, Hunter was in Berlin for the last time for a show at nGbK, LOVE AIDS RIOT SEX 2 curated by our friend Frank Wagner. While he was in Berlin I took a series of portraits of Hunter. (See slideshow above.)
Michael James (MJ) Gordillo
Michael has shared a short video of one of Hunter's Mummification performances, at which he was an assistant. Mummification was series of performances Hunter carried out from the late 1990s until 2015 which featured the artist being wrapped from head to toe by assistants, with only his right arm exposed. The project reflected his struggles with this body's deterioration as a result of long-term HIV survival, including the aftermath of an AIDS-related stroke that left the right side of his body partially paralyzed.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts...
Alexandria Deters
Hunter, how can I begin? It still feels like you are here and I can just call you up. I meet you in 2019 through Esther McGowan because you needed help with your archive. I came over to your studio in Brooklyn and we ended up talking for three hours. We just clicked. Since that moment you became a part of my life. I would visit you and hang out, talk shit about the art world and gossip about the past. Over time you became one of my closest friends, I could tell you anything and feel safe. You never judged me and you never made me feel like a weird freak.
One of my favorite memories is when I was finally able to come over during 2020 and you made me pad thai with lots and lots of peanut butter. It was delicious and I felt so spoiled by you taking the time to make a vegan dish. You were feeling better and there was so much hope.
Sadly the hope wasn't long lasting and your health went downhill, every bit of good news soon turned into two steps back. Yet somehow you were hopeful and fought harder every time. You inspired me then and inspire me every day now.
I told you, well you have to stay around at least till I turn 30, and you said oh alright. When I turned 30 I asked if I looked old. You gave me a quick once over and said "Yes". You were always so sassy even till the end.
The last time I saw you I sang to you for hours and to make you feel loved and held your hand and told you I loved you and you whispered love you too.
I still talk to you and know your here, giving me your opinions with all your sarcasm and wit. I love you Hunter and I will always have you with me.
