about
Collective Futures
is a six-week, citywide project activating Philadelphia’s network of artist-run spaces, DIY venues, and community-based initiatives. This collaboratively organized project bringing together more than 30 independent spaces and organizations, Collective Futures will unfold across the city through exhibitions, performances, workshops, and public programs from Kensington and North Chinatown to West Philadelphia, Fishtown, and Old City, between October 2 and November 15, 2026.

At its core, Collective Futures centers collective practice as a vital mode of cultural production. Across disciplines and contexts, the project highlights how artists come together to build shared platforms, experiment with new forms, and sustain creative communities.

Taking place during the 250th anniversary of the so-called United States, while many institutions in Philadelphia conjure programming around the complex histories of nation-building and democracy, Collective Futures highlights the artistic experimentation and alternative models that grassroots cultural spaces have long been building

Collective Futures is grounded in the specific conditions of Philadelphia, where a rich ecosystem of artist-run and DIY spaces has made collaborative cultural production possible. As rising costs and development reshape the city, the project affirms the importance of collective cultural life and the infrastructures that sustain it, so that our work can mobilize resources, deepen connections, and envision transformative futures.

Collective Futures is:

  • 2C Books / Marginal Utility
  • 5U Space
  • All Mutable
  • The Arts League
  • Asian Arts Initiative
  • AUTOMAT Collective
  • Batikh Batikh
  • Bearded Ladies
  • Big Ramp
  • Biomaterials Working Group
  • BYO Printmaking Collaborative
  • Center for Emerging Visual Artists
  • Cherry St Pier
  • cinéSPEAK
  • City Arts Salon LLC
  • Da Vinci Art Alliance
  • Fable Encounters
  • Fairmount House
  • FJORD
  • Future Flower Collective
  • FORTUNE
  • Gravy Studio
  • Grizzly Grizzly
  • The Halide Project
  • Hall Pass
  • Icebox Project Space
  • Jane Gallery
  • Luster Gallery
  • Memory Workers Guild
  • Muse Gallery
  • Obvious Agency
  • Paradigm Gallery + Studio
  • Peep Projects
  • Pentimenti
  • People’s Music Supply
  • Pink Noise Projects
  • Practice
  • Prism Arts
  • Second State Press
  • Space 1026
  • Teils Studio
  • Termite TV Collective
  • Tiger Strikes Asteroid Philadelphia
  • Ulises
  • Umbria Arts
  • Vox Populi

Made possible with the support of the Penn Treaty Special Services District (PTSSD).

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Maroon’s Motherboard

Memory Workers Guild

October 11, 2026

Maroon’s Motherboard: Archives and Autonomous Networks for Free Black Futures
12-2pm Sunday, October 11th, 2026
at Paul Robeson House Museum, 4949 Walnut Street, Philadelphia PA 19139
Presented by Memory Workers Guild

Maroon’s Motherboard is a workshop assembling micro-mobile archives and autonomous networks for free Black futures. Facilitated by Wynn Eakins and Khalil Abdellah, the workshop is presented as part of Collective Futures by Memory Workers Guild, in collaboration with the Paul Robeson House & Museum.

About Memory Workers Guild

The Memory Workers’ Guild (MWG) is a decentralized collective of friends, peers, and community members dedicated to the preservation, restoration, and production of Black cultural legacies, experiences, and memories. We are artists, archivists, event planners, non-profit staffers, program coordinators, book collectors, DJs, dancers, and more. 

The Guild exists to create a better present and future for the legacies of Black cultural workers that are often buried behind the nature of our care. While members engage in cross-cultural work in solidarity with all oppressed groups, we center Black, queer, and femme perspectives as both clarifying principles and protective boundaries against the anti-Black racial, sexual, cis-hetero, and class violence that appears all too regularly in our lines of work.

Whether in museums, schools, community centers, non-profits, neighborhoods, and otherwise, there’s a bitter irony many of us have experienced that our deep care for cultural preservation has led to a dismissal of our needs by institutional powers and sometimes even ourselves. In the case of the former, MWG serves as a platform to leverage a collective effort against these painful dismissals, a potential to fight together against our shared working grievances. In the case of the latter, MWG serves as a home base for the replenishment of our tools of care, joy, culture, and energy.