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Chelsey Luster is a Philadelphia-based curator, visual artist and art educator.  Her visual artwork focuses on intimacy, vulnerability, and privacy through depictions of domestic spaces. Come learn more about  Chelsey as she participates in conversation with Maida R. Milone, curator of the upcoming exhibition CFEVA at 40: Four Decades of Supporting Contemporary Art. Discover how Chelsey pursued her creative dreams and how she balances the many hats she wears. Her piece, Marsh, is part of the upcoming CFEVA exhibition at the Michener.

Cover image credit: Chelsey Luster, Marsh, 2023. Oil on panel, 36 x 60 inches. Courtesy of the artist

Chelsey Luster Bio:

Chelsey’s work explores the complexities of safe spaces in Femme, Queer and Black culture through mixed medium paintings and installations. Her current body of work, Finding Home, reinterprets the concept of safe spaces by creating introspective portraits with installations and mixed-media paintings that give Black, Queer, Trans and Femme individuals the space to share what sounds, textures, memories, colors, and spaces make them feel safe. These works showcase Black, Queer, Trans, and Femme people in a way that highlights their tenderness and vulnerability to challenge their hyper-sexualized and performative narratives often placed on these communities in mainstream media.

As a curator, her exhibitions showcase a passion for creating safe spaces for art expression in immersive art installations. Her exhibitions challenge the binaries of gender and social norms by confronting and dismantling monolithic beliefs about various cultures and reshaping the power dynamic between curators and artists to build a care-centered community within the Philadelphia art scene. As a curator, her relationships with artists are rooted in creating long-term support, limitations of labor, and creative agency.

Chelsey is the Exhibition Manager at Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens and has independently curated multiple art exhibitions with institutions in Philadelphia including IceBox Project Space, Da Vinci Art Alliance, William Way LGBT+ Center and the Center for Emerging Visual Artists.

Maida R. Milone bio:

Maida R. Milone, lead curator and designer at My Personal Curator, is a lifelong art enthusiast and collector who interwove arts administration, exhibition management and curation into her multi-faceted professional life.  She currently serves at the Board Chair of the Center for Emerging Visual Artists. She is co-curating the exhibition CFEVA at 40: Four Decades of Supporting Contemporary Art which opens at the Michener Art Museum on February 17th, 2024.