Inside Peter Eric Lopez’s Painted Archive of Queer New York
For Mood Magazine
There is something wildly intimate about asking someone to sit still in New York City.
Not pose. Not perform. Not scroll. Not brand themselves into oblivion under the fluorescent pressure of relevance. Just… sit.
And maybe that’s why, listening to Peter Eric Lopez describe the evolution of his portrait practice, I couldn’t help but wonder:
In a city obsessed with spectacle, is stillness the last radical act?
Because Peter’s work is not really about painting. Not entirely. The portraits — lush, emotionally intelligent studies of queer icons, performers, survivors, Broadway legends, drag revolutionaries, club royalty, and chosen family — are really evidence of something much rarer: attention.
The kind we no longer know how to give each other.
Before the exhibitions. Before the gallery walls. Before the downtown acclaim and the slowly accumulating mythology around his work, Peter Eric Lopez was a comic book kid. The kind who loved illustration with religious intensity. Then life, as it often does, interrupted the dream.
Art disappeared for a while.
He traded sketchbooks for theory. Paint for philosophy. He pursued literature, earned graduate degrees in English and education, immersed himself in academia, language, criticism, thought. The artistic impulse didn’t vanish so much as go underground, waiting patiently beneath the architecture of adulthood.
Then one day, a friend sent him a Japanese print of two cranes.
No dramatic revelation. No cinematic orchestral swell. Just a simple image shared between friends.
Peter painted it as a birthday gift.
And suddenly, after years away from art, something reopened.
Not ambition. Not careerism. Something quieter.
Meditation.
He describes falling in love not with the result, but with the act itself — the slow surrender of observation. He began painting photographs from his travels. Friends. Fleeting moments. Then, almost accidentally, portraits.
At first, the canvases were disposable exercises. He painted people and threw the works away. Painted another. Threw that one away too.
Which feels strangely beautiful now, considering how much permanence his portraits would eventually come to hold.
Because what Peter discovered wasn’t simply that he could paint people.
It was that he could see them.
And seeing someone — truly seeing them — requires a terrifying amount of vulnerability.
Especially in queer communities.
Especially in New York.
Especially after survival.
So his apartment, then later his Brooklyn studio, became something between a salon, a confessional, and a cinematic séance. Former students home from college sat on couches while movies played softly in the background. Friends talked through heartbreaks and memories. Conversation drifted while paint accumulated in layers.
The portraits became records not only of faces, but of presence.
And eventually, queer New York began arriving at his door.
The legendary Joey Arias.
The magnetic downtown icon Kevin Aviance.
Performers whose lives helped define the emotional architecture of the city after midnight.
Ironically, it was the stillness of COVID that made many of these sittings possible. Clubs were shuttered. Stages went dark. Cabaret paused mid-breath. And suddenly, the people who had spent decades performing movement had nowhere to go.
So they sat.
For Peter.
And maybe that’s why these portraits feel haunted in the best possible way. They emerged from a moment when the city lost its noise and people were forced to encounter themselves without applause.
Then came the message that changed everything.
Or rather, the reply.
Late one summer night, Peter was watching Primal — a hyper-violent animated series about a caveman and a dinosaur, which somehow feels exactly right for this story — when his phone lit up with a message from André De Shields.
Yes, that André De Shields.
Broadway royalty. Living legend. Survivor. Elder. Oracle in platform heels.
Peter had emailed him cold.
Like every modern artistic miracle in New York, it started in the DMs.
André responded almost immediately:
“I looked at your work, and I would love to sit for you.”
I swear there are love stories with less emotional impact than that sentence.
When André finally arrived at Peter’s Brooklyn studio, he surveyed the paintings and asked a deceptively simple question:
“Where’s your signature?”
Peter admitted he had been hiding it on the backs of the canvases, unsure if he deserved to claim the work publicly yet.
André pointed to the blank portrait waiting for him.
“You’re gonna sign this one on the front.”
Reader, I nearly levitated.
Because sometimes the greatest thing another artist can give you is permission.
Permission to be visible.
Permission to claim authorship.
Permission to stop apologizing for your gift.
And perhaps that is what Peter Eric Lopez is really painting over and over again: permission.
His portraits do not exoticize queer life. They do not flatten people into symbols of suffering or spectacle. Instead, they restore dimensionality to communities often consumed as aesthetic shorthand.
The glamour remains — of course it does. This is New York. These are nightlife legends. Sequins and survival are practically synonyms downtown.
But underneath the glamour is exhaustion. Triumph. Humor. Aging. Grace. Memory. Loneliness. Legacy.
Humanity.
That humanity came full circle when André De Shields later attended Peter’s exhibition, standing proudly in front of his portrait for hours, greeting guests like a king blessing his own archive into existence. Later, Kevin Aviance performed at another exhibition simply because he believed in the work.
No ego. No transaction. Just love.
And maybe that’s the thing about queer cultural history that institutions still fail to understand: it survives because communities carry each other.
One person opens the door.
Another says yes.
Another stays three hours longer than they have to.
Another performs for almost no money.
Another tells you to sign your name on the front.
In Peter Eric Lopez’s world, portraiture becomes more than portraiture.
It becomes evidence.
That these people were here.
That they mattered.
That they changed New York.
That they survived it.
And in an age where everything disappears into the algorithm within hours, there is something profoundly moving about oil paint insisting otherwise.
Maybe that’s why his work lingers with you.
Because beneath every portrait is the same quiet question:
Who loved us enough to remember our faces?
And perhaps, after all this time, Peter Eric Lopez finally does.
by Jarvus Ricardo Hester
Mood Magazine. We curate your mood!
