Gay clubs in reading pa

Artist Inhwan Oh has memorialized Philly’s rich history of queer bars in an installation that highlights their importance as well as their fleeting ephemerality.

Titled “Where He Meets Him in Philadelphia,” the site-specific function is part of the featured exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, “The Shape of Time: Korean Art after 1989.“

It features the names of 36 queer bars and clubs that have existed in the city (find a partial list below). The names are layered atop one another on the floor in powder incense. They were also burned according to centuries-old rituals and meditative practices, though due to heat hazard restrictions, that deed is displayed on a small monitor beside the piece.

“I focus on the relationship between my labor and the audience,” Oh, who is based in Seoul, told Billy Penn. “I hope that through my work they can sense and think of the history, memories, emotions, and sensations of the gay community.”

For Bob Skiba, curator at the Williams Way LGBT Community Center and author of the Gayborhood Guru blog, the burning process spotlights the short-lived existence of many of Philly’s queer cultural spaces.

“Although we think of them as signposts in