In Memorium: Lessons Learned From The Footsteps We Follow

This panel brings together organizers of Philadelphia’s DIY and artist-run spaces to reflect on spaces that have closed, changed form, what they made possible, and what they left behind. Through stories of triumphs and struggles, participants will consider how Philadelphia’s arts landscape has changed, what gaps remain, and what lessons might be useful to those continuing to build artist-run spaces today. This talk will explore the labor and care of building DIY spaces and how we can create sustainability for the places and people that make them happen. Featuring Libby Rosa (PEEP), Kristen Neville Taylor (Little Berlin), and Heather Bowlan (Small Works).

• Libby Rosa (PEEP)
• Kristen Neville Taylor (Little Berlin)
• Heather Bowlan (Small Works)

Libby Rosa (PEEP Gallery):

Libby Rosa is an artist, curator, and teacher working in Philadelphia, PA. Rosa creates paintings, sculptures, and site-specific installations featuring shape-shifting and embedded imagery that push the boundaries of built environments. She received her BFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2015) and her MFA from Cornell University (2019). She’s been featured in Whitehot Magazine, Canvas Rebel, Artblog, David Zwirner’s Platform Interview: One Day, New American Paintings, Maake Magazine, and Inertia. She’s had recent solo exhibitions at Ortega y Gasset Projects (Brooklyn, NY) and Blah Blah (Philadelphia, PA). She participated in recent group shows at Current Space (Baltimore, MD), SPRING/BREAK Art Show (New York, NY), J, Mother-In-Law + Field Projects for Upstate Art Weekend (Germantown, NY), Hide and Seek (Portland, OR), MASS Gallery (Austin, TX), and Hexum (Montpelier, VT). Rosa has attended residencies at Tongue River Residency (Dayton, WY), Trestle Art Space (NYC, NY), ASMBLY Session #1 (NYC, NY), and VCU SSP (Richmond, VA). She curates for Peep Projects, a nomadic gallery space in Philadelphia, PA, and for the Philadelphia waterfront. She founded Peep Project in 2020, a nomadic gallery in Philadelphia, curates public art along the Philadelphia Waterfront with DRWC and teaches at Fordham University.

Kristen Neville Taylor (Little Berlin):

Kristen Neville Taylor is a Philadelphia artist whose diverse practice combines video, sculpture, and glass which converge playfully in installation style environments. Her work considers the impact of the stories we tell about nature calling attention to the systems and events that establish definitions and shape public perception of the environment. In 2019, she co-founded The Green Sun, a multifaceted project focused on the intersection of art and policy as they relate to the history of energy, energy democracy and possible energy futures. Taylor is the recipient of the ‘23 Pew Fellowship, Laurie Wagman Prize in Glass, a RAIR Recycled Artist-in-Residence, and a Penn Program for the Environmental Humanities Artist-in-Residence. In 2024, she was awarded the NJ Coastal Management Community-Based Art Grant and exhibited Come Into View at Wheaton Arts & Cultural Center in the Fall of 2025.

Heather Bowlan (Small Works Gallery):

Heather Bowlan is a writer, organizer, and fiercely loyal Philadelphian. From 2023 to 2025, she served as co-director of Philadelphia Small Works Gallery, a space for artists who build community through work that reveals our obsessions, resists oppression, and celebrates our complex connections. Heather's collection of self-erasures and collaborative poems, Highlights & Blackouts, was published by _mixlit press in 2023. In 2026, she launched Philly Poetry LFG!!!, a newsletter highlighting the movers & shakers in Philly's many poetry communities.

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.