"Philadelphia" Screening

Philadelphia Screening
Monday, December 1, 2025
Arthur Ross Gallery

Building Tours - 5:00 - 6:00 pm
Talk - 6:00 – 6:30 pm
Screening - 6:30 – 8:30 pm

In conjunction with World Aids Day, the Arthur Ross Gallery presents a special screening of Philadelphia (1993, dir. Jonathan Demme), starring Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington. Philadelphia tells the story of Andrew Beckett, a lawyer who takes legal action against his firm after being unjustly dismissed due to his illness. With some scenes filmed on location in the Anne and Jerome Fisher Fine Arts Library’s reading room, Philadelphia was the first major Hollywood film to confront HIV/AIDS, homophobia, and workplace discrimination.
The screening will be introduced by art historian and curator Jonathan Katz, Associate Professor of Practice in the History of Art Department and Gender Studies and Women’s Studies, whose 2016 exhibition, Art, AIDS, America traveled to five museums across the country. Following the film, audience members are welcome to stay for an open conversation on representation, advocacy, and care in art and media.

MORE ABOUT JONATHAN KATZ

Jonathan David Katz, Associate Professor of Practice, History of Art, is an American activist, art historian, educator and writer, widely regarded as a founding figure in the field of queer art history. His scholarship spans a period from the late 19th-century to the present, with an emphasis on the US, but with serious attention to Europe, Latin America and Asia as well. He has written extensively about gender, sexuality and desire, producing some of the key theoretical work in queer studies in the visual arts.

Recent projects include a study of the international influence of Herbert Marcuse’s writing on the visual arts from the 1950s to the 1970s, a new reading of the cultural wars in the era of AIDS and contemporary resonances of that conflict, a project envisioning supplanting the predominantly binary understanding of sexuality with a trans perspective, and new work on queer Latinx artists in periods of dictatorship. He curated the first major museum queer exhibition in the US, his 2010 Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, which was attacked by the Republicans and resulted in an international censorship conflict over the removal of a film by David Wojnarowicz (while winning the 2011 award for best national museum exhibition by the international organization of art critics, its catalog awarded the best non-fiction queer text by the American Library Association).

Katz earned his Ph.D. in art history from Northwestern University in 1996. Early in his career he served as chair of the Department of Lesbian and Gay Studies at the City College of San Francisco, and was the first tenured faculty member in gay and lesbian studies in the United States. He was executive coordinator of the Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies at Yale University and he founded the Harvey Milk Institute and the Queer Caucus for Art of the College Art Association.

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