New York’s Oscar Wilde Temple makes a saint out of an LGBTQ icon

VOX
By Tara Isabella Burton

The Oscar Wilde Temple in the West Village

NEW YORK---Hidden in the basement of New York’s Church of the Village, a Methodist church in Greenwich Village, is an entirely unconventional worship space. The aesthetic — a neo-Gothic stained glass window, a devotional statue, a series of paintings depicting the life and suffering of a martyr — is perfectly familiar. At the Oscar Wilde Temple, a religiously themed installation project by McDermott & McGough, the art-world tag of artists David McDermott and Peter McGough, the central statue and the figure of worship is of Wilde himself: the 19th-century Anglo-Irish novelist and playwright whose name has become synonymous with LGBTQ liberation. [More]