The importance of Oscar Wilde in the fight against homophobia will be celebrated this September at the Russell chapel in New York’s Church of the Village in a new installation by the Brooklyn-based artist duo David McDermott and Peter McGough, The Temple of Oscar Wilde (11 September-2 December). The show takes visitors back to Wilde’s era, transforming the chapel into the style of the 19th-century Aesthetic movement that struck Wilde during his 1882-83 visits to the US as “the perfect embodiment… of ‘art for art’s sake’”, says the show's curator Alison Gingeras.
The show will include a series of paintings by McDermott and McGough, modelled after depictions of the Stations of the Cross, that tell the story of the 1895 trial against Wilde for “gross indecency”, his imprisonment and sentence to two years of hard labour. Works on show also pay homage to other martyrs of homophobia, such as Alan Turing, Harvey Milk and Marsha P. Johnson.
During the installation, the chapel will be available for memorials, weddings and other special occasions, and proceeds will benefit the nearby Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center of New York, which collaborated on the exhibition. “I hope a space like this will communicate acceptance and will allow people to feel a kind of aesthetic and experience of humanism, of love, of great beauty,” Gingeras says.
After its New York presentation, The Oscar Wilde Temple is due to be shown at Studio Voltaire in London.