For the second year in a row, The Luminary has been awarded St. Louis Magazine’s A-List. This year, we won for Best Music Series for the Elevator Music Series. Pick up a copy of the magazine throughout July to read about the award and to check out all of the other incredible award winners.

Here is a sample of what they had to say about us:

“How do you get folks to get out and support local bands? Find a venue with one of the best sound systems in the city…make it feel more like a happening and less like a gig.”

Thank you to St. Louis Magazine and to all of the bands, fans, and artists that make it all possible!

The Album Leaf + Sea Wolf Interview with the Post-Dispatch

The Album Leaf + Sea Wolf Review

Music + Film: Califone at The Luminary

The Luminary Center for the Arts

The chapel is now an installation space. The basement hosts art shows and indie rock concerts. And the bedrooms where young novices prayed store canvases and cameras.

“Can you imagine? Everything they owned was in this one room,” said Luminary Arts founder Brea McAnally, peaking into a printmaker’s workspace. “Each of them had a small sink and a closet which, when you think about it, is ideal for an artist. Really, these rooms couldn’t be anything else but studio space.”

Room by room, Brea McAnally and her husband, James, are converting this old convent on Kingshighway into a destination for local art and music lovers. The upcoming exhibit “Cause + Time” will showcase work that can be altered by outside forces, from rain to onlookers.

The Elevator Music Series takes place in the center of the Luminary’s gallery and merges music and the visual arts. Last month, experimental band Califone performed the score to the movie “All My Friends Are Funeral Singers” while the film played. Next month, Album Leaf and Sea Wolf perform.

But the Luminary’s main mission is to serve as a home to artists who need studio space, access to equipment and — this is the best part — patrons. Through its innovative residency program, the Luminary pairs artists with patrons for three-, six- or 12-month terms. A patron pays $100 a month to support a local artist; more for a national or international artist.

The artist gets studio space and access to the center’s growing resources: an art library, a woodshop, a variety of technical equipment. The patron gets a work of art.

“It creates a more personal connection,” Brea McAnally said. “The buyer gets to watch the process of the artist, and it minimizes the distance between artist and artwork and buyer and gallery. You’re paying what you would normally pay for one piece of art, but you’re allowing an entire body of work to be created.”

And St. Louis holds on to another artist.

“There are plenty of spaces you can rent that are affordable, but we’re more interested in providing a resource,” James McAnally said. “What we want to do is help recent grads who are transitioning from student and try to connect them to galleries and help with their professional development and really work to keep them in St. Louis and thrive here.”

The McAnallys may seem an unlikely pair to offer career advice. Neither has formal visual arts training or, for that matter, a business education. Brea, originally from Sullivan, is 22 and a self-taught photographer. But she has turned her hobby into a thriving commercial venture. James, originally from Mississippi, is 27 and studied music and English, but he developed a knack for the painstaking work of writing grants.

“We have very different people personalities — she’s a problem solver, and I always have 100 ideas and I would never be actually be able to see them come to light but she is great with details,” James McAnally said. “But at the same time, if we go into a gallery at a different time, we pick up …”

“The exact same things,” finished Brea.

Read the original article here.

Journey Through Time

By Paul Friswold

Paintings and sculptures appear to be static objects, but time is most assuredly having its way with the artwork. Pigments fade, canvas dries and cracks, even stone erodes and crumbles given enough time. The five artists participating in Cause + Time, the new exhibition at the Luminary Center for the Arts (4900 Reber Place; 314-807-5984 or www.theluminaryarts.com), each incorporate time as another medium in the finished piece. Andrew Cozzens’ sculptural objects combine industrial materials with organics, creating art that needs to be tended to every day or part of it will wither and die. Eric Souther’s installation Dataform actually builds itself up based on the amount of time you spend with it. An outline of your body is created from the projected data of various social media services; the more you interact with the piece, the longer it exists. Using moss-based paint, Brea McAnally will paint a mural on a building that will slowly expand and become something else as time marches on. Cause + Time opens with a free public reception from 6 to 9 p.m. Saturday, May 1. The Luminary Center is open Wednesday through Saturday, and the work remains on display through Saturday, June 26. Admission is free.

Read the original article here.

RFT Featured Review: Old Media/Old News

Yesterday’s headlines are re-presented in traditional (old) media by a group of local and international artists in this inventive elegy to the death of print journalism. Idiosyncratic, methodical processes seek to replace or reclaim the generative grind of tangible print: Martin Brief fills in all the O‘s that appear on the front page of the daily newspaper in hyper-minimalist maps of dots that suggest a concealed but perhaps arbitrary code. Writer Austin Kleon uses a Sharpie to black out the majority of text on a page, suggesting that what’s left reveals poetic insight into otherwise prosaic reportage. Lisa Bulowsky recollects her “flash bulb” memories of historic events that occurred during her lifetime, printing half-childlike, half-harrowing abstractions of her experience with otherwise remote traumas. And in the ultimate feat of sustained meticulousness, Xiang-Yang’s Newsreel employs entire rolls of scotch tape to peel off the printed faces of celebrities and other media-saturated notables, creating reams of ephemeral, repetitive portraits that resemble unspooled film stock of pummeling propaganda. Fact, here, becomes marginalia, while emotional and personal experiences surface as all that’s most articulate, memorable or worth remembering. The exhibit also includes work by Michelle Forsyth and Jihoon Park. Through March 27 at the Luminary Center for the Arts, 4900 Reber Place; 314-807-5984 or www.theluminaryarts.com. Hours: noon-6 p.m. Wed.-Sat.

Read the original article here.

The Luminary Center for the Arts Presents the Elevator Music Series

The Luminary Center for the Arts (4900 Reber Place) is presenting a new monthly event called the Elevator Music Series. The first show will take place on March 26, with local act the Pragmatic and out-of-towners Anathallo.

The aim of the series is to draw national acts to town, while showcasing talented local and regional acts, as a way to improve the St. Louis concert landscape. Luminary director James McAnally says the center will also be conducting interviews and doing podcasts with the bands.

“We plan to be educational to musicians and audiences alike, providing in-depth information about the details of making music, making it in music, and how art and commerce coexist in the industry,” he says. “It is a need we see in the local music scene that hopefully this will address.”

The Pragmatic is also performing at Off Broadway next Friday, January 30, and is confirmed for a SXSW showcase.

View the original story here.

Multipurpose Venue
Luminary Center for the Arts

Formerly a convent, the nuns’ quarters—tiny, well-lit, equipped with sinks—make perfect artists’ studios. The Luminary also curates art shows that generously invite audiences to participate; its monthly Elevator Music Series is marvelous. But its conscious merger of art and service sets it apart, with its “Blank Canvas” art classes for low-income kids serving as just one example.

See the original article here.

Best New Multimedia Gallery

The Luminary Center for the Arts

Watch a New Live Song from The Books

A few weeks back, the low-tech sound-collage duo the Books played to a tittering crowd at St. Louis’ Luminary Center for the Arts. At that show, the band played a spacey, mellow new track called “Group Autogenics”, and the rear projections that accompanied them made visual jokes out of the duo’s trademark instructional snippets.

The performance has been captured on video, then posted online with a few extra bits of animation. Check it out below. Hopefully, that new Books album is imminent.

Read the original story here.

The Books ~ Group Autogenics from Ciao Music on Vimeo.

When We Build, Let Us Think That We Build Forever

Home, or a sense of place, seems to be an ever-elusive but primary concern for the creative set, as this group show by local artists confirms. BJ Vogt piles strata of Styrofoam and tufts of green twist ties to create a mountainous, occasionally green-sprouting form based on the shape of his arm. Christine D’Epiro consumes a discrete gallery space with a floor-to-ceiling patchwork of paper bags painted black and punctured with small holes that reveal bits of luminous color. The body, here, becomes a kind of location; and what seems like the density of night becomes a dense, all-consuming place. Also participating are Jessica Kiel-Wornson, Brea McAnally and Peter Marcus, who explore the spirit of the habitable environment from the stock form — or shards of form — of a house.

Read the original here.