Past Art Gallery Exhibitions

Intimacy
18th Annual Juried Art Exhibition
In person: January 21-March 1, 2024 at Off the Wall Gallery at Dirty Franks Bar (347 S 13th Street)
Virtual Exhibition

For our first off-site juried art exhibition, artists were invited to respond to the theme “Intimacy”. Intimate confessions emerged from text found within various works: “TOUCH STARVD”; “Trans sex is holy”; “Becoming a man was the best decision I ever made”; “I just need somebody to love”. Some artists focused on reflection, baring a chest in the mirror, distorting old family photos, or documenting a holiday spent alone. Others documented intimate moments from afar, or intimate areas up close. Many of the works are incredibly small, and require closeness while looking. Ultimately, the 42 artists included in this exhibition share works that are emblematic of the closeness present and necessary within our community.

Margin/Margin
A multi-media project by Heather Raquel Phillips
In person: September 15-November 9, 2023
Virtual Exhibition

Margin/Margin is a multimedia project that highlights QTBIPOC in leather culture. Through film and photo, the featured participants share personal pleasures and challenges as people navigating sexual dynamics within marginalized BDSM communities. It's also a glimpse into a microcosm that reflects larger, systemic issues laden with isms and phobias. While the core issues addressed in this project concern race, visibility and representation, parallels can be drawn with a variety of body politic marginalizations.

Ex/Instance
17th Annual Group Art Exhibition
In person: July 14-August 31, 2023
Virtual Exhibition

The diverse works (paintings, photos, drawings, sculpture and video) of the three recipients of the Juror Award of the Center’s 17th Annual Juried Art Exhibition provide powerful proof of the vitality that exists within this community and individually among the three parts of one exhibition. But if there is one thing that connects all three artists, it's their willingness to be honest and authentic, to reach into their own lives to create something important, and to ultimately help shape a space that demands to be looked at, read, watched and ultimately seen.

Art of Pleasure: An art exhibition presented by Hot Bits Film Fest
Guest curators: Chelsey Luster & Eva Wu
In person: May 12-June 29, 2023
Virtual Exhibition

Through an array of mediums, the thirteen featured artists invite us to reimagine sexuality as a tool for self-expression, connection, and liberation. With their works, they challenge the prevailing narratives of shame and stigma around sex and desire, and instead celebrate sensuality as an essential aspect of human experience. Join us on this exhilarating journey of discovery and pleasure as we honor the resilience and creativity of queer and trans BIPOC communities.

The Last Time We Spoke You Said You Were Not Here...I Saw You Though
2nd Art Student Biennial
In person: March 10-April 27, 2023
Virtual Exhibition

“Sneaking in and out of thought” encapsulates the theme of this exhibition. This lyric by Shabazz Palaces, taken from the song that lends the exhibition its title, is all about validation and our experience of existence. Many artists in the queer community today address the question of recognition: this exhibition reinforces that not only are we here, we are visible and we are noticed. This Biennial aims to expand the queer artistic conversation and connect us by pointing out our similarities and our differences.

Selections from the Archives: Rami George
Roberta Dickinson: An Exhibition
In person: January 13-February 23, 2022
Virtual Exhibition

Engaging with the extensive collection of images and printed material within the John J. Wilcox Jr. Archives at the William Way LGBT Community Center, Selections from the Archives revisits and (re)frames the histories woven within Philadelphia’s local queer community. In searching for underrepresented voices and representation, Rami George presents excerpts from a variety of collections within the Archives, primarily focusing on snapshots of everyday life and fragmented moments of political action, as well as exploring the history of the Center itself. This exhibition also includes an installation of watercolors and drawings by the late Roberta Dickinson (1916-1982), a local trans artist and activist whose collection is held within the Archives. Primarily active in the 1970s, the works selected offer an early example of a transgender artist documenting her own transition through art.

How Deep Is Your Love?
The 17th Annual Juried Art Exhibition
In person: November 10-December 15, 2022
Virtual Exhibition

The William Way LGBT Community Center’s 17th Annual Juried Art Exhibition brings together and celebrates local queer artists from the Philadelphia area. Love is a common theme throughout the artworks presented, whether it be self love, love for others, or a feeling of longing and yearning. Even when the artwork isn’t specifically about love, the artists’ love for their artistic process is clearly represented.

Becoming A Vessel
A solo art exhibition by Alexei Mansour
With works by Duncan Grant
In person: September 15-October 28, 2022
Virtual Exhibition

Sprawling in their range of references, the works of artist Alexei Mansour displayed in Becoming a Vessel harnesses the visual grammar of Greco-Roman Antiquity in order to explore the fluid, amorphous nature of queerness and subjective identities. Among the multiplicity of bodies and vessels alike, figures intertwine and mirror the once secret works of British artist Duncan Grant (1885–1975) that also appear in the exhibition, adding another layer to the representation of eroticism made visible in queer history.

Queer Ecologies
Virtual Exhibition

William Way LGBT Community Center and Bartram’s Garden partner to showcase LGBTQIA+ artists/artist teams who explore the intersections of queerness, ecology, and community building through their work. With Queer Ecologies, we seek to explore our relationship to nature as a queer community – how are we inspired by, engaging with, and, perhaps most importantly, understanding ourselves as part of nature? And how are we, in turn, leveraging our experiences to provide unique solutions to the social and environmental challenges we’re facing?

Queer Abstraction: The A/symmetry of Looking
The 16th Annual Group Art Exhibition
Virtual Exhibition

If an experience of being LGBTQIA+ is a fundamental distrust of reality as it is constructed and represented by society, then Queer abstract art represents that questioning distrust. It is the consequence of the relentless need to be authentic, to construct a language that is natural to oneself. It is a means to emancipate the imagination and free it from the confinement of a realistic depiction of the human figure, still life and landscape of the canonical beaux arts tradition. It is, like Queer life, rebellious, individualistic, unconventional and confrontational.

Generations: Becoming Our Culture
Virtual Exhibition

The foundations for our Queer cultural community were established in the generations coming of age in the 1950’s and 1960’s, the Silent Generation and the Boomer Generation. The artists, musicians, performers, and authors from these assertive generations of Queers powerfully represented an open declaration of Queer creativity in our society. The eleven artists, four poets and one musician presenting their creativity in this unique arts exhibition are all members of this foundational cohort of LGBTQIA+, a generational wave of Queers who refused to be silenced, ignored, rejected or erased.

Queer Euphoria: The Radicalness of Joy
Virtual Exhibition

Within our society, marginalized peoples are routinely and systematically attacked and told to believe that our existences are less than and something to be ashamed of. Through expressing our joy and reveling in our identities, our joy becomes a form of active protest against an oppressor who would seek to rid us of it. Queer Euphoria showcases the works of 15 queer artists living in Philadelphia. Through painting, photography, textile, printmaking, ceramic, collage and more, these artists depict joy and unapologetic happiness in vibrant personal narratives and shared experiences. This exhibition seeks to highlight this joy and proudly display the way in which we as marginalized peoples live and love our identities, and the euphoria we experience within our lives as they are enriched by the communities we form together.

WHEN I SAY ME, I SAY YOU: QUEER x 37
The 16th Annual Juried Art Exhibition
Virtual Exhibition

These thirty seven artists have created alternative routes through their art, for themselves and also for us. Their powerful, uncompromising artworks individually, and as an entire exhibition, demonstrate that you and I are not isolated individuals wandering in an alien world. We are members of a cultural community, fifteen million strong in the US, who have created an amazing alternative life together for ourselves. We can revel in the wonder of our community, viewing these diverse, assertive artworks. In Philadelphia, Queer art and culture is thriving.

Among Us: Four Decades of Art & AIDS in Philadelphia
Virtual Exhibition

Among Us: Four Decades of Art & AIDS in Philadelphia presents works by 35 artists with connections to Philadelphia, past and present. The role of art in raising awareness, combating stigma, protesting inaction or hateful rhetoric, and memorializing those lost to the disease cannot be understated. For four decades, the LGBTQ+ and the HIV/AIDS communities have found expression and solace in art. This exhibition brings together a wide range of those expressions manifested in art by those among us who died of complications relating to AIDS; by those among us living with HIV; by those among us who have lost friends, lovers, parents, elders, and role models.

when you open your mouth to pray
The 15th Annual Group Art Exhibition
Virtual Exhibition

Solitude provides a quiet place of reflection, a vehicle both to see and understand oneself, synthesizing the effect of personal histories and the inquiry for desired futures. When you open your mouth to pray, William Way’s Annual Group Art Exhibition, examines this notion of self, through lenses of grief, exuberance, love, longing, and community. Practicing in three disparate media, Sharyl Cubero Aguilar, Kara Mshinda, and Dove Nasir’s meditations on personhood cut to the fundamentals of identity.

Moving Forward When the World Stopped: Queer Life 2020-2021
Virtual Exhibition

Moving Forward When the World Stopped: Queer Life 2020 - 2021 focuses on the individual and shared experiences from the past year, 2020-2021. Themes include the pain and loss through the pandemic, the continued fight for racial justice, and growing concern over politics and policy, as well as imagery that shows the rebuilding of hope, community, and strength. The exhibition will serve as a timeline of our communities' experiences throughout the unforgettable year of 2020 and the beginning of 2021.

Moving Pieces: Selections from William Way’s Permanent Art Collection
Guest curator: M Slater
Virtual Exhibition

Moving Pieces showcases work from William Way’s Permanent Art Collection that speaks to world-building—Specifically, the different materials and construction processes used to create different environments and realities. By focusing on the act of building itself, line, language, and action emerge as the bricks, beams, and scaffolding that shape alternative worlds into being. Together, the pieces form an architecture in motion—diagrams and plans for constant negotiations with structure, physical or invisible.

15th Annual Juried Art Exhibition
Virtual Exhibition

2020 has been fraught with incredible challenges and loss. While this is something unique for many, the Queer community has been through moments like this before. And so we are uniquely equipped to address this moment. We have always redefined parameters of time and space. Our embrace of failure, resilience and resistance is our strength, creating possibilities for a new world of liberation and love. This multigenerational show explores themes ranging from identity politics, to mental health issues, desire and history. The overarching result is a fleshy delivery of Queer manifestation.

Tenses: Queer Bodies Through Time
The 14th Annual Group Art Exhibition
Virtual Exhibition

In William Way’s 2020 Group Exhibition, artists Chelsey Luster, Esaí Alfredo Figueroa Ruiz, and Vicente Ortiz Cortez explore, through different styles and techniques, a series of interrelated themes across different timelines: past, present and future. Through the use of (self) portraiture, the artists help us to not only connect with them and their stories, but masterfully invite us to reflect how simple things like love, the privacy and solitude of a bathroom, or even the comfort of our daily routines can all be taken by death, violence, or even inaction – making us feel both vulnerable, but also a pathway for us to imagine not only a different past, but a better present and maybe even, a more positive future in a time when it feels not only needed, but urgent.

Gilbert Lewis: Awkward Tenderness
Virtual Exhibition

In this exhibition, one of four art exhibitions in Philadelphia dedicated to Gilbert Lewis’s artistic legacy, the artist demonstrates his persistent attention to visually capture the portrait of the young man as tenderly naive about the world. His portraits are suffused with his care to convey the wide eyed awkwardness of young men who sought guidance and trust in their artistic relationship with him, as his model. Gilbert Lewis’s portraits are haunting, beautiful and honest.

The Art Student Exhibit
Virtual Exhibition

This LGBTQ+ art student exhibition is the first presentation of its kind ever to be held in Philadelphia. The William Way LGBT Community Center is proud to sponsor this rare opportunity to view artworks by emerging LGBTQ+ artists. The 35 participating artists represent graduate and undergraduate students from three Philadelphia art schools: The University of Pennsylvania, The Moore College of Art & Design, and The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. This next generation of LGBTQ+ artists with their diverse artworks, demonstrate the persistent vitality of our community’s art & culture.