Chelsey Luster

Chelsey Luster is a Philadelphia-based curator, visual artist and art educator from Baltimore, Maryland. Luster received their BFA from Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture and attended a residency at Chautauqua School of Art. As a curator, Luster has organized multiple group exhibitions, was a Katheryn Pannepacker Curatorial Fellow at the Da Vinci Art Alliance, and is currently developing their curatorial practices as a Vox Populi member and Exhibition Manager at Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens.

Luster’s visual artwork focuses on intimacy, vulnerability, and privacy through depictions of domestic spaces. With their “American Bathroom” series, they use bathroom scenes to explore queer Black womanhood with regards to lack of privacy, invasion of the Black queer body, power structures, and isolation. Her work acknowledges the obstacles that burden queer Black women because of the intersectionality of their gender and sexuality and depicts these concepts through the renderings of voyeuristic bathroom scenes. In Luster’s current body of work, she is making work of people in their most vulnerable and personal physical and mental spaces whether it be in their studios, bedrooms, homes, or wherever they feel most at peace.