Peter Hujar’s work has never looked more cinematic or attentive to everyday life than it does in this show. The roughly one hundred contact sheets on view feel like silent filmstrips ready for reanimation. In one from 1955, Daisy Aldan, the poet and Hujar’s high school teacher, reads from a book and extends her arms, as if attempting to illustrate the text. Another from 1972, a nude identified in Hujar’s notebook only as “Andrew, an English boy,” shows a soft-shouldered young man seated, then standing contrapposto, then scratching his back—attention given to his shifting gestures, value achieved in the sum of the parts rather than in a definitive image. These contact sheets are not quite artworks. They’re not exactly tools either. Akin to most programming at the Morgan, they’re more like manuscripts or drafts of screenplays. What Hujar bracketed, circled, or check-marked on the contact sheets isn’t always better than the alternatives; often, it just indicates a particular direction. In 1974, for instance, trees in a forest took precedence over images of Andy Warhol reading the newspaper.

Hujar’s cityscapes and pastures, which critics have struggled to situate within his oeuvre, appear here as establishing shots for the episodic narratives unfolding elsewhere—John Waters in the crowd hanging out at Christopher Street Liberation Day in 1973; Fran Lebowitz waking up in New Jersey in 1974. What is typically onstage or off, on camera or off, or edited out, remains connected, intact, and satisfyingly in frame. —Marcus Civin

The sixth in an intermittent series of Studio Museum shows featuring young Black artists and all titled with words beginning with “f,” Fade is the most spiritual installment. It goes to the bath house, the beach, fiction, and the family photo album, turning up ghosts, labyrinths, and saints. The theme is overdetermined by the inclusion of blurred photographs, washy abstractions, and Lola Ayisha Ogbara’s installation of ceramic kola nuts each titled Forget Me Knot (2023–2025). (Kola nuts, a caffeine-rich stimulant, keep you from “fading.”)

Antonio Darden’s video Untitled (Perform 2) (2026), which loops a short clip from a Luther Vandross concert at high volume in the main gallery, gives the impression that the late singer, nicknamed “The Velvet Voice,” now can’t stop wailing. The piece ought to have headphones. The sound steals focus from the exhibition’s substantial pleasures, such as Chiffon Thomas’ Epilogues of the Disremembered I (2026), a wing-like form roughly cut into the wall and filled with embossed sheet music for spirituals; Jesús Hilario-Reyes’ A River Opens Up Into Many Windows (2025), a steel latticework evoking medieval church architecture; Utē Petit’s drawing In Red Bed Country (2023), depicting a human figure curled up crying beside a bloodied deer; and Kiah Celeste’s Sink Belly (2025), where maroon spandex stretched over a frame suggests a full stomach and, in place of a belly button, there is an open drain. Almost a goddess, this riveting body seems designed to ingest and carry away unwanted fluids. —Marcus Civin