The William Way LGBT Community Center is proud to announce its upcoming art exhibition, Arleen Olshan: The Tangle I’ve Gotten Into, opening January 16, at iMPeRFeCT Gallery (5539 Germantown Ave., Philadelphia). On view through February 21, the exhibition features deeply personal drawings, paintings, and photographs by artist, activist, and William Way co-founder Arleen Olshan. Olshan’s 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 brings together two interconnected bodies of work. Dead Dykes & Some Gay Men features drawings, paintings, and photographs that honor LGBTQ+ activists, colleagues, friends, artists, authors, and lovers whom Olshan knew and has since lost. Rooted in a decades-long commitment to memorializing queer lives, the series draws from Olshan’s personal archives alongside materials preserved in the John J. Wilcox Jr. Archives at the William Way LGBT Community Center. Olshan first conceived the project more than 30 years ago, in the mid-1990s, when a close friend, Gil Forman, then dying from complications related to HIV/AIDS, asked her to paint a portrait of him and his partner, Zach, after his passing. Completed in 2024, that original painting became the catalyst for an expanded series now comprising more than a dozen portraits. Each work is rendered with remarkable tenderness, bearing witness to the deep ties of care, memory, and community that have defined Olshan’s life and activism. The project is supported by an artist grant from the Velocity Fund and an Art and Change Grant from the Leeway Foundation.

Presented alongside the memorial series is Women Loving Women, featuring Olshan’s work from the 1970s and 1980s. The large-scale, figurative paintings and drawings, many created during her time as a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and exhibited at the William Way in the 1970s, capture the intimacy, eroticism, solidarity, and liberation of lesbian feminist communities during a transformative period in American queer history.

Arleen Olshan is a visual artist, graduate of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and hand crafter of custom leather accessories. She has been active in the LGBTQA+ and Feminist Communities for over 50 years trailblazing the way forward. Beginning in the late 1960s, Arleen worked with Radicalesbians and the Gay Activist Alliance. She was co-coordinator of the original Gay Community Center (now William Way LGBT Community Center). From 1976 – 1986 she was the co-owner of Giovanni’s Room in Philadelphia, the oldest LGBTQIA+ and Feminist bookstore in the country. Arleen was a case manager for We the People Living with HIV/AIDS helping with housing and daily living issues, and an Addictions Counselor at Thomas Jefferson Hospital for women in recovery. Arleen was the co-founder of Mt. Airy Art Garage where she served as Treasurer and Executive Director for over 14 years. Learn more about Arleen on her website: arleenolshan.com

Founded by Renny Molenaar and Rocio Cabello in 2012, iMPeRFeCT Gallery was created with the intention and hope of becoming a voice in the community and in the ongoing conversation with the art world. The approach to this work is that of a facilitator, where artists of very different persuasions can present themselves and their work with as much freedom as possible. Programming includes monthly exhibitions, performances, and other events; it is also our intention to bring art out of the gallery, with the creation of works in public places, the publishing of limited edition prints, and an active presence on the internet. We, as artists, strongly believe in the transformative powers that the arts bring to our lives. We want to share that experience and inspire action and change. Learn more at imperfectgallery.com.