The Center is pleased to invite you to a retrospective exhibition featuring the work of visionary artist David Meade Walker. A native of Lancaster, PA, Walker’s emotionally resonant work spans mediums and styles-- from pen and ink to oil; pastoral scenes to striking impressionistic self-portrait. This exhibition is a glimpse of a full life through the eyes of one artist and those who knew him.

About David Meade Walker

Born in Lancaster, PA, in 1948, and raised in the Amish country in nearby Bird-in-Hand, David was greatly influenced by the beauty and simplicity of country life. He excelled in art, and experimented with a wide variety of media from an early age.

He got a degree in art history from Indiana University of Pennsylvania in 1971, and he came out in college, first to our stepfather, a loving and supportive minister at the time. No surprise to the family, and no big whoop!

Refusing the draft for the Viet Nam war, David did alternative service at a church conference center in Sharon, CT, and a hospital in Providence, RI. He moved to San Francisco in 1978, and from 1979 to the end of his life, lived in an apartment on Page Street in Haight Ashbury. He died September 12, 2012, at the Zen Hospice, at the other end of Page Street.

David was always quite modest about his art, though he was amazingly gifted at so many media, from pen and ink to watercolor to acrylic and oil. He was not commercial in the least, preferring small commissions of portraits and such, and gifting pieces away. He left several portfolios under his loft, and from this collection, and works loaned from friends and family, come the selections in this exhibit.

Later in his life, David said he felt there was enough art out there, and he turned to tending his and friends’ gardens. This became his love and solace. His Zen style garden was enjoyed by many friends and neighbors. He said: in the end, the garden takes care of the gardener. He was also well known as a property manager, teacher, and chef, Scrabble master and channeler of Emily Dickinson. He loved the Giants, all good jazz and classical music, walking and communing in Golden Gate Park, and Maigret and other PBS mysteries.

He was one of the earliest to be infected with the HIV virus, long before anyone knew what it was. When he was officially diagnosed in 1988, David proceeded down the long road of the new drugs and therapies, and when one would no longer be effective, the next one that came along would help. (Viral load: 40,000; then: undetectable.) Every time another development or affliction happened, he’d say, well – there goes the fender. His spirit, love of life, and the light in his eyes never left him; he kept his sharp and sly sense of humor to the end. AIDS-related lymphoma was ultimately what his body could no longer fight, and that’s when he decided to live out his days at Zen Hospice.

That’s also where he met and fell in love with the chef, Gregory, but that’s another whole story, isn’t it?

This year the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program has partnered with the Attic to offer an afterschool internship that aims to build community, reduce isolation, combat homophobia, promote knowledge and life skills, and develop future leaders through an arts-based social practice. Youth came up with a variety of imagery to promote visibility and self-acceptance.  The work displayed is a collection of some of their portraits and woven stories.

The Attic Youth Center serves lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex, and asexual youth as well as allies of the LGBTQIA community.

The Attic’s goal is to reduce the isolation felt by LGBTQIA youth by providing a sense of community and developing programs and services to counteract the prejudice and oppression that LGBTQIA youth often face.

Attic Youth Center Mural Arts Interns

Leef Aikens
Kyah Flythe
Khalil McKnight
Anaiia McLean
Shane Miller
Nashima Mouzon
Chenk Richardson
Blue Roberson
De’yana Smith
Cynthia Thorne

Lead Teaching Artist: James Dunn
Assistant Teaching Artist: Carolina Gomez

Curated by Joan Lubin

“As historically significant as they are campy and salacious, the pulps record the fears and fantasies of a postwar American culture.”

Our latest Archives exhibition explores the history of queer pulp fiction novels. Pulp fiction occupies a crucial role in the life stories of many queer folks coming up before Stonewall and after. Intended to intrigue, alarm, and arouse, pulps also provided representations of queer lives—however distorted and sensationalistic—when few others were available. Cheap enough to be disposable and for sale in train stations, newsstands, and drug stores, gay pulps came to serve as the connective tissue for a nascent LGBT community. Queer folks could find their loves and lives animated on the page, and, later on, in the back pages of the books could find advertisements for homophile organizations and place personal ads. Bridging the legal decisions of the early 1960s that redefined obscenity more narrowly and opened the floodgates to unapologetic representations of queer characters and perverse pleasures, the pulps from the John J. Wilcox, Jr. Archives on display in this exhibition register the shifting relationships between queer people and the law, medicine, science, and politics from the birth of the pulps after World War II to the shuttering of the major pulp presses in the late 1970s. As historically significant as they are campy and salacious, the pulps record the fears and fantasies of a postwar American culture anxiously obsessed with differentiating the normal from the deviant.

This exhibition of twenty artists and twenty artworks have been brought out from the permanent collection of the William Way LGBT Community Center. They have been stored in the Center’s art archives and many have not been on public display for several years. They represent twenty years of active acquisition of art from LGBTQI artists who have exhibited their work in the Center’s art gallery, or are works that have been given as gifts to the Center.

The diversity of the works is evident from the media used (pencil, pastel, watercolor, acrylic, oil, paper and canvas), from the mediums (drawing, painting, printing, photography and collage) and from the artist’s focus of interest (landscape, figure, portrait and abstraction).

These art works give expression to the declarative identity of each individual portrait, as well as the power of relationships and community. They directly confront the viewer with an unashamed celebration of personal and communal joi de vivre. From overcoming alienation and social oppression, to experiencing pride filled solitude, from the exuberance of public art displays to the intimacy of private passion these art works openly display “we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.”