Remembering Hunter Reynolds, 2022
For the Visual AIDS online memorial page and read an excerpt during the memorial event.
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
