About this Event
Building Sustainable Relationships as an Artist
Track: How To: Collective Tools & Tactics
Presented by Luster Gallery +Studio
"Building Sustainable Relationships as an Artist” is a workshop focused on helping artists cultivate meaningful, long-term connections that support both creative growth and career sustainability. Grounded in the belief that relationships are as vital as artistic practice, this session explores how to build authentic connections with collaborators, curators, collectors, and communities without compromising one’s values.
Through guided discussion and practical exercises, participants will reflect on their networks and learn strategies for clear communication, boundary-setting, and maintaining relationships over time. The workshop also addresses common challenges such as navigating power dynamics, sustaining collaborations, and handling conflict.
Artists will leave with tools to approach networking with intention, strengthen relationships through accountability and consistency, and build systems that extend beyond a single opportunity. Rooted in equity and community, this workshop supports artists in creating a more connected, resilient, and values-driven creative practice.
Facilitator Bio
Chelsey Luster is a Philadelphia-based visual artist, curator, educator, and founder of Luster Gallery + Studio. Originally from Baltimore, Maryland, she earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Tyler School of Art and Architecture. Her multidisciplinary practice explores the complexities of safe spaces within Black and Queer communities through mixed-media paintings and immersive installations that center memory, vulnerability, grief, celebration, and care.
Through interviews, collaborative processes, and portraiture, Luster creates work that gives agency to her subjects while exploring the intersection of identity, community, and belonging.Her practice frequently incorporates glitter, fluorescent color, cyanotypes, found materials, mirrors, and layered textures to examine visibility, protection, and emotional complexity.
Luster is also a curator whose work centers care-based, community-rooted exhibition making. She is the founder and director of Luster Gallery + Studio, a Philadelphia gallery dedicated to supporting emerging artists, particularly artists of color, women artists, and Queer artists. She currently serves as Exhibition Manager at Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens, where she manages exhibitions, oversees the Julia Zagar Residency for Women Artists, and supports the stewardship of Isaiah Zagar’s extensive collection.
Her curatorial and collaborative work has included partnerships with IceBox Project Space, DVinci Art Alliance, William Way LGBT Community Center, and the Center for Emerging Visual Artists. Luster was a 2022 Fellow for the Mural Arts Philadelphia Fellowship for Black Artists and a 2021 Fellow of the Center for Emerging Visual Artists.
Her work has been exhibited at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Woodmere Art Museum and is included in the permanent collections of Penn Medicine and the Woodmere Art Museum.
ABOUT PARALLEL PLAY
The Parallel Play Symposium, presented as part of the six-week Collective Futures festival, is a two-day gathering of artists, scholars, organizers, and cultural workers exploring the practices, histories, and conditions that sustain collective cultural production. Through free panels, workshops, and performative presentations, participants will examine the cultural significance of collective art-making and artist-run spaces while sharing strategies for building and maintaining collaborative cultural infrastructures.
Organized around thematic tracks—including How To: Collective Tools & Tactics, Relational Infrastructures, Precarious Solidarities, “Have You Seen the ___?”: Memory and Collective Spaces, and Playground: Place, Ecology & Entanglement—the symposium will feature workshops, panels, performances, and conversations presented by ATUOMAT Collective, Luster Gallery + Studio, Obvious Agency, Vox Populi, Termite TV Collective, All Mutable, FORTUNE, FJORD, Big Ramp, Da Vinci Art Alliance, cinéSPEAK, Practice Gallery, and many other collaborators.
Registration is required for each session.
Event venue & nearby stays
Asian Art Initiative, 1219 Vine St, Philadelphia, United States
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups — all the happenings, one place.