Arab Heritage Month Feature: Rami George

Portrait of Rami George in the John J. Wilcox, Jr. Archives at the William Way LGBT Community Center. Photo by Ryan Collerd, courtesy of The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.

Jake Foster: What first brought you here to the John J. Wilcox, Jr. Archives at the William Way LGBT Community Center? 

Rami George: In 2019 I had my MFA thesis exhibition, brotherly love, sisterly affection. And that was my first time entering the archives (or any kind of archive). I've been interested in the idea of archives and collections for a long time, but I had never actually physically engaged with an archive until I worked on that project in 2019.

The spark was an interest in LGBTQ+ historical markers in Philadelphia; who they name, what they name, and what they don't name, and who they don't name. That was a prompt that took me to the archives. I began looking into interesting figures that emerged from that exploration; people related to the historical markers, and many folks that are not, or not yet included.

JF: Since then, you've done so much work here in the archives and gallery, serving as our inaugural Artists-in-Residence. Through that engagement, there were three exhibitions; Selections from the Archives, your solo exhibition here at the Center in 2022, AND INTO THE STREETS at Kahn Park in 2023, and then The Crisis Isn't Over at Jefferson University’s Helix Gallery. Can you reflect on your time as an Artist-in-Residence?

RG: I do have one other iteration within this time as Artist-in-Residence: I have older work from 2019 that collects some of Donna Mae Stemmer's photographs, so I presented excerpts of that on a double-sided digital billboard in LA in 2023.

I think I basically started this relationship with John Anderies from the Archives in 2019 and I knew that there was just so much more that I was interested in exploring. And that was the impetus to propose Selections from the Archives, which was just an excuse to get to know the archives more and to search, find, and pinpoint some of the lesser-represented people in the archives—women, trans, non-binary, POC, and disabled folks. 

Selections from the Archives opened up these other opportunities. I had reached out to Jamison Page at Mural Arts to discuss a billboard project, and they instead proposed an exhibition. And that was how AND INTO THE STREETS came into being. That was my first exhibition in an outdoor public space. It was exciting to think through the question of: what does it mean to take this material out? Especially in a moment of increasing attacks on LGBTQ+ people, especially trans folks, and so I knew I wanted those underrepresented folks in the park as well. 

We put up the exhibition in Kahn Park in June 2023 (during Pride month), and so there were things that I was conscious about during Pride; like pleasure, joy, public-ness, and visibility. I also wanted to bring a lot of protest imagery, but also private elements—that are tender and beautiful—into public space. With both of those shows, we did a lot of public programming, and that was also special to invite folks to respond to what I had found with a reading, drag show, or a conversation with elders. I also really appreciate how my work with the archives has enabled community engagement.

And then after that exhibition, I got invited to do a project with Jefferson University's Helix Gallery, The Crisis isn't Over, which was the first show that they had in that space. The medical school was doing a unit on HIV/AIDS, but the students had no historical context. They just understood it as a virus, a medical thing, and within our current context of PrEP—a much different relationship to the crisis. I was excited to bring a lot of protest to that work, like images from ACT UP. We also did a little bit of public programming with that. 

I've had conversations with folks and they're like: are you an artist? A curator? A historian? Yes, yes, and also, yes. In all of them, I was playing some sort of artist/curator role. And I also think of the installations and exhibitions as a work of art.

JF: Our Arts Committee chose you to feature this month specifically for April, for Arab Heritage Month, and I was wondering if you wanted to talk a little bit about some of your other work that kind of draws from another part of your identity, your Lebanese heritage.

RG: So I have three main tethers of my practice; one being archives and queer history, another one is related to a New-Age spiritual community that my family was involved with in the ’90s, and the third one has been an ongoing exploration of my own relationship to Lebanese culture and heritage. In those projects around the Middle East and my identity, I also explore Palestine and my proximity and distance to it. 

I have a work from 2016 called virtually every site one can visit virtually: gaza strip, and I was thinking about an inability to access places—the inability for me to go to this place—but that there are many people from the community who have documented it via Google. That work takes on a really different meaning at this moment. It's been shown in this moment, and it's hard to look at, but it's also important as a history of a place that was once really vibrant with life. 

This past year, I've just been doing a lot more activism, Palestine-solidarity work, and protests, so I have been back in the archives specifically looking for Palestine. I’m hoping to fill some of those gaps at some point, but what I've found more are examples of queer antiwar activism across different generations. 

This includes Vietnam, but also antiwar activism around Central America in the ’80s and ’90s—conflicts that we have more-or-less collectively forgotten or don’t remember, myself included. We aren’t taught the details of the U.S. intervention in Nicaragua or other Central and South American countries, but there was a lot of activism surrounding it. 

And within those, I’m looking for solidarity moments to Palestine and the Middle East, like during the First Gulf War. So, I have this material that I'm sitting with in terms of some sort of publication in the future.

And I've also wanted to build a queer solidarity protest collection in the archives. I have photos that I’ve taken when I've gone out to a protest and found queer solidarity, and I've been meaning to set up a way for people to share those sorts of images with me also, so that I could print and put them in archives.

Every day, it feels more important, but I am also trying to think about how to do that safely in this current climate, where people are being disappeared, arrested, and doxed. But I do think that there's something so worthwhile about the idea that someone in the future could come to the archives and find that material. 

JF: Obviously we find ourselves in divisive times. There's backtracking of rights, but specifically attacks on art, history, speech, and culture. What stories of strength or resilience have you found in the archives that can help us in this moment?

RG: Yeah, my go-to favorite are the actions by Kyoshi Kuromiya, specifically the ones on the University of Pennsylvania’s campus when he was a student there. These were protests against the Vietnam War. Had an incredible poster that said “Fuck the Draft” in huge font and photograph of someone burning a draft card—which is illegal. Even just selling that got him arrested multiple times, but he kept selling the poster. He had some ads in some of the gay publications for Mother's Day, that these posters would be a great gift for your mother. 

Another famous action was when he said he was going to napalm a live dog on the steps of the Van Pelt library. Thousands came to protest, and he then distributed pamphlets that said, “Congrats, you've saved the life of an innocent dog. What about the lives of these innocent people 10,000 miles away?” 

What I find inspiring is his commitment to solidarity and antiwar activism, and the creative and beautiful ways that he was doing it, despite the risks he was taking and constantly getting arrested and those have been things that I keep sitting with. 

I also think of the legacies of ACT UP and their ongoing work. It’s powerful when artists pivot their practice in times of crises towards a really important cause. So, within ACT UP, I think of the work of the activist artist collective Gran Fury, and how they used their talents and labor to speak to the current crisis. I've been taking a lot of lessons and notes from that for this current moment.