The City of West Hollywood is pleased to present Bird Circuit 90069, a new exhibition featuring original artworks on canvas and paper by Los Angeles–based artist Vojislav Radovanović, which interweaves myth, queer histories, and personal narrative. Building on artist Vojislav Radovanović’s earlier project Bird Circuit, this iteration locates itself within the heart of West Hollywood—a city whose social history is inseparable from LGBTQ+ life, resilience, and community.

 

The exhibition title references the covert, coded naming convention of LGBTQ+ friendly bars of the past. Before bars were able to advertise themselves officially as LGBTQ+ venues, they used code names to covertly signal themselves as places of queer refuge and connection during times of intense social and legal oppression. Often the first word of the bar’s name was a color, and the second word was a bird.

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This was known as the ‘bird circuit’ – in the middle of the 20th century, you could visit any urban area in the country and usually find a ‘Blue Parrot,’ ‘Black Swan’ or a ‘White Swallow.’ It is unknown exactly where the term originated from; it may have been derived from a cluster of bars located along Third Avenue in New York City in the early 1950s. The bars had such names as the Blue Parrot (on East 53rd Street), the Golden Pheasant (on East 48th Street) and the Swan. Police raids eliminated these bars by the late 1960s.  The earliest known reference to Bird Circuit in print was in Tennessee Williams’ 1953 play Camino Real, which is set in a fictional, tropical town at the end of the Camino Real, a town “outside of time in a place of no specific locality.” The first known LGBTQ+ establishment with a name following the color-bird naming pattern was The White Swan on Vere Street, in London, England, a molly house which was raided on July 8, 1810. Twenty-seven men were arrested, eight were tried and convicted, and two men were hung as part of the Vere Street Coterie.

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Several works in this exhibition pay homage to historic LGBTQ bars and clubs in West Hollywood and Los Angeles, such as the Red Raven, Blue Parrot, Club Flamingo, and Flamingos. Through painting and drawing, Radovanović conjures a poetic aviary where birds become metaphors for freedom and coded identity. Radovanović transforms these hidden sanctuaries into surreal images, often combining male portraiture with dreamlike landscapes and feathered figures that shimmer with history and desire. Bird Circuit 90069 celebrates queer resilience, acknowledging a lineage of coded survival while reimagining it as a vibrant, contemporary myth.

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About the Artist: Born in 1982 in Yugoslavia, Vojislav Radovanović is a Los Angeles-based multimedia artist whose practice explores the immigrant experience, LGBTQ+ identity, collective memory, and the natural world. Coming of age during a period of political unrest and war, his work frequently employs motifs of birds and wild plants as symbols of resilience, adaptation, and borderless migration. Radovanović, who earned his BA from the University of Fine Arts in Belgrade, has exhibited at venues like Lancaster Museum of Art and History, Torrance Art Museum, and internationally at the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris and Mall Galleries in London.

 

Curated by City of West Hollywood Arts Division. For more information contact Mike Che, Arts Coordinator, mche@weho.org. 

 

 

 

See more at https://www.weho.org/community/arts-and-culture/visual-arts/library-exhibitions/bird-circuit-90069