This Is (Not) a Celebration: Queer Resistance 1976/2026

Opening Reception: Thursday, June 11, 6-9PM

Artist Talk: Thursday, June 25, 6:30-8:30PM

Gallery Hours: Fridays and Saturdays, 12-6PM (closed Juneteenth & July 4th)

This Is (Not) a Celebration: Queer Resistance, 1976/2026 brings together artwork by Philadelphia-based artists Scarlett DeLorme, Justin Jain, and Amy Cousins, organized by the William Way LGBT Community Center. Each artist was invited to create work in dialogue with materials from the John J. Wilcox, Jr. Archives—the most extensive collection documenting the history of Philadelphia’s LGBTQ+ community.

The exhibition is part of Radical Americana, a citywide initiative organized by The Clay Studio that unites 25 of Philadelphia’s arts and cultural institutions in a series of exhibitions responding to the Semiquincentennial. The project showcases research-driven work by 45 artists inspired by the history and art of 1776, 1876, and 1976, as well as the present moment. Together, these exhibitions celebrate Philadelphia’s historic role in shaping America’s cultural identity, civic life, and creative spirit, while inviting reflection and dialogue about the nation’s present and future.

Within this broader civic reflection, This Is (Not) a Celebration shifts the focus from commemoration to resistance. Archival materials from 1976 anchor the exhibition, including the “Lesbian Feminist Declaration of 1976” by the Philadelphia lesbian feminist organization Dyketactics!, published in Hera, a local feminist newspaper; photographs and ephemera from the July 4, 1976 counter-Bicentennial demonstrations; and contemporaneous coverage in publications such as the Philadelphia Gay News, founded earlier that year. The year 1976 also marked the founding of the Gay Community Center of Philadelphia, now the William Way LGBT Community Center, which is currently celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2026.

Scarlett DeLorme, a wet-plate collodion photographer working at the intersection of disability and queerness, uses Victorian-era photographic processes to create contemporary portraits of Philadelphia-based LGBTQ+ activists and organizers. By placing emerging leaders alongside those who began their activism in 1976, DeLorme visually traces lines of continuity across generations, asserting that queer resistance is both inherited and evolving. Scarlett DeLorme’s work will also be featured in a virtual exhibition by the Dina Wind Art Foundation.

Justin Jain, a queer first-generation Filipino performance and visual artist, honors LGBTQ+ ancestors and activists of 1976 through altered wheel-thrown vessels and hand-built ceramic sculptures. Reworking patriotic symbolism into cultural dialogue, Jain unsettles dominant national narratives while honoring both the queer radical past and its living present.

Amy Cousins is an artist and educator from Houston living in Philadelphia who works across media, including printmaking, fabric, and sculpture to investigate queerness and its relationship to history, futurity, and desire. Her work particularly draws from radical queer archives and the playfulness historically wielded by these communities to combat oppression.

Presented in active dialogue with archival materials from the John J. Wilcox, Jr. Archives, the work of these three artists insists that 1976 was not a moment of patriotic consensus, but one of queer defiance. As the United States marks 250 years, This Is (Not) a Celebration reframes the anniversary as a moment of protest, solidarity, and survival—asserting that queer resistance is not peripheral to American history, but foundational to it, and ongoing.

The William Way LGBT Community Center received funding from Pennsylvania Creative Industries, powered by the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a state agency funded by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the National Endowment for the Arts.