Opening Reception for Arleen Olshan: The Tangle I’ve Gotten Into

Opening Reception for Arleen Olshan: The Tangle I’ve Gotten Into

Join us for an Opening Reception for the William Way LGBT Community Center's exhibition Arleen Olshan: The Tangle I’ve Gotten Into at iMPeRFeCT Gallery in Germantown, Philadelphia. Olshan’s foundational role in organizing the William Way LGBT Community Center’s first art exhibition in 1976 makes the exhibition a particularly fitting opening to the Center’s year-long 50th-anniversary celebrations in 2026.

The exhibition presents two bodies of work. The first is Dead Dykes & Some Gay Men, which includes drawings, paintings, and photographs honoring the many LGBTQ+ activists, co-workers, friends, artists, authors, and lovers who Olshan knew that have died. The artwork is created primarily using personal materials, along with photographs and information from the John J. Wilcox Archives at the William Way LGBT Community Center. Olshan’s portraits are imbued with immense love and care. The project was conceived 30 years ago when her friend, Gilbert L. Forman was dying of complications of HIV/AIDS in the mid-1990s. He gave Olshan a photo of him and his partner, Zach, and requested she complete a painting of it to remember him after he died. Olshan ultimately completed Forman’s portrait in 2024, the same year she began expanding the project to honor over a dozen additional subjects. Olshan’s project is supported with an artist grant from the Velocity Fund and an Art and Change Grant from the Leeway Foundation.

Dead Dykes & Some Gay Men will be presented alongside Women Loving Women, which highlights Olshan’s figurative paintings and drawings from the 1970s and 80s, including works created during her time as a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. These large-scale pieces vividly capture the zeitgeist of the lesbian feminist community of that era, celebrating the beauty of lesbian intimacy and desire through Olshan’s personal relationships and perspective.