Announcing the new Arts Advisory Board!
Announcing the new Arts Advisory Board!
11.8.2022
The Luminary is proud to announce the members of our renewed Arts Advisory Board!
The Luminary is proud to announce the members of our renewed Arts Advisory Board: (from left to right) Molly Pearson, Kalven Duncan, Lisa Bulawsky, Jen Wohlner, Laura Schilli, Jared Witherspoon, Tara Chandra Mahadevan, Lindsay Braman, Emma Bright, Kristian Blackmon, Jessie Donovan, Hayveyah McGowan; and (not pictured) Allison Lacher, Dr. Bill, Grant Benoit, Jamilaa Jackson, Keni Walker, and Allison Lang. The board was selected through an open call process, sent out to the wider St. Louis arts community, neighbors to us on Cherokee Street/Benton Park West, and those with vested interest in St. Louis Arts and Culture.
Working collaboratively with one another and Manager of Public Engagement Kalaija Mallery, the Arts Advisory Board will give key insight to the organization's exhibitions and programs and help shape the institution through direct feedback, responsive planning, radical outreach, and fundraising and development.
Please join us in welcoming these members with gratitude for their vital role in shaping the organization!
Arts Advisory Board members bios:
Laura Schilli has been involved in the St. Louis art community since 2014. An avid supporter of artists and creative practitioners in the city, Schilli is currently the Marketing & Communications Associate at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation. Her wide-range of skills include, but are not limited to strategic and creative marketing tactics, planning and executing fundraising events, leading campaigns, and managing various different community engagement and administrative projects. Schilli’s experience ranges from working for civic organizations like Grand Center Inc of the Grand Center Arts District, Counterpublic and Hawai‘i Contemporary - two multi-site art exhibitions that spread across the city of St. Louis and Honolulu. Schilli is thrilled to be joining The Luminary’s Artist Advisory Board and hopes to bring creative ideas to the table that are centered around audience engagement, activation, and accessibility.
Molly M. Pearson is a writer, educator, and organizer based in St. Louis. She works with universities, advocacy and service agencies, and cultural institutions to engage with sexuality, culture, and systems. Her work explores sex, identity, aging, illness, community, and the risks we take to survive and make life worth living. She is a member of the What Would an HIV Doula Do? collective and teaches at the Brown School of Social Work. Some of her writing can be found at TheBody, Foglifter, The New Territory Magazine, and elsewhere. She implores us all to listen to our elders. Instagram/Twitter: @MollyMPearson.
Lisa Bulawsky is an artist and printmaker known for her works on paper and temporary public projects. Her work explores the reciprocal influence of culture on the individual, especially as shaped by time, history, and memory. She is a founding member of the art collective Fifty-Fifty, working to negotiate cultural tensions through socially engaged art practices. Recent exhibitions include the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Miami Dade Public Library, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Eleanor Wilson Museum. Lisa is a professor of art, chair of the MFA in Visual Art program, and director of Island Press in the Sam Fox School at Washington University.
Kristian Blackmon is a community organizer, activist, creative and art curator. She has been organizing and curating art shows & exhibitions since 2012. Some of her most notable shows & exhibitions are “Invisible No More”, “i STILL love her”:A Celebration of Women in Hip-Hop, “R U Still Down?”:A Music & Art Tribute to Tupac Shakur, “I Am A Revolutionary” ,“Black Joy is Resistance", “To STL, With Love” and her most recent show, "SEEN": A Love Letter to Black Queer & Trans Folx. She has also curated work with and for James Biko’s, “BIG UP” tribute to the Notorious BIG & “One In A Million” tribute to Aaliyah. Kristian has also done teaching artist work through the Pulitzer Arts Foundation at the Covenant House & with Cherokee Street Development Group at Love Bank Park. She also curated a mini “i STILL love her”exhibit at St.Louis Public Library’s Hip-Hop Appreciation week in 2018. Some notable panels and lectures she has been a part of are: ‘The Continuum: Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter’ featuring Sonia Sanchez presented by the St.Louis Black Rep & the Nebraska Repertory Theatre St. Louis Arts & Education Council’s ‘Catalyst Conversations’ around Art & Equity ‘Future of Black Art’ presented by The Black Speculative Arts Movement & Afrofuturism 2.0. During her curation career, Kristian has worked with at least 40 established career and emerging artists.
Hayveyah McGowan is a multidisciplinary artist with a focus in painting & design. Her studio practice focuses on the ways in which black women create and maintain autonomy in a world that inherently denies this right. In her most recent exhibition "Feelings of Home: A need to simplify" she explores the ideas and practices of sacred space making, as past down from her matriarchal lineage. McGowan takes symbolism from nature, numbers, patterns and objects to create spaces that give way to the qualities of receptivity, nurture, and sensuality. Through that process she wants to call attention to the unique ways that the black maternal lineage creates safety but also the synchronicity and rooted need for safety that we share.
Emma Bright is an international award winning filmmaker who specializes in experimental filmmaking. She studies and incorporates the practice of light refraction using her crystals and cameras. Her most recently completed project is titled “Woolgathering,” featured in 10+ film festivals worldwide. She is currently in post-production for “SO(U)L,” a project in which her collaborators took a dream and grounded it into the physical realm. In addition, Emma works on community-based news segments, documentaries, live-event coverage, and brand content for companies nationwide. She has expertise in cinematography, producing, directing, editing, event curation and art direction. Emma is a connector. She loves bringing strangers together especially when it involves a collaboration process.
As both mental health therapist and artist, Lindsay Braman’s work focuses on the intersection of mental health and pop art. Lindsay holds a Master of Arts degree in Counseling Psychology from The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology and has previously worked in community mental health in Seattle. Her work as a digital illustrator, where she interprets psychological concepts into playful visuals, informs one of her favorite parts about doing therapy with individuals: helping people find their own strengths and use them to translate between their unique internal experience and the external world. Lindsay’s work has been featured by The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Buzzfeed, Forbes, and the Museum of Modern Art.
Kalven Duncan is a queer artist and photographer based in Chicago, IL and Saint Louis, MO. Kalven has established a practice rooted in their interest in art historical narratives, the production of images, and the limitation of photographic processes. Their work has consistently dealt with themes of identity and its performative elements by deconstructing their personal visual vocabulary. Kalven has exhibited their work throughout the Midwest and online. In early 2022 their solo exhibition, “through this window, another side,” was on view at the Foundry Art Centre in St. Charles, MO. Kalven has also been interviewed and published through The Coastal Post, ode to queer, Hazel Art magazine, and other online publications.
Dr. Bill : Artist. Architect. Musician. Physician. Autism at adopted by working class congregationalists. Dr. Bill’s acute awareness of being “different” inspired him to explore and subvert constructs of gender, sexuality, culture, and individual identity. Early influences of folk and fiber art traditions were passed down from his grandmother. He worked on trash trucks, switched trains on the Santa Fe Railroad, made a living as an archaeologist at the Cahokia Mounds, and restored historic architecture throughout St. Louis. Dr. Bill holds advanced degrees in physical medicine, acupuncture, and the fine arts including a BFA in Ceramics and Printmaking and an MA in Weaving from Pittsburg State University and an MFA in Multimedia from Washington University. Additionally, he studied dance with Katherine Dunham and DeBorah Ahmed, contact improvisation with Sarah Shelton Mann, West African percussion with Mor Thiam, and toured internationally with Gash/Voigt Dance Theater as an installation artist, videographer, and physician.
Tara Mahadevan’s work as a journalist and writer is an effort to champion music discovery, and emerging and indie artists—and to dig deep into the communities that rear them. Her work has appeared in Vice, Chicago Tribune, Village Voice, The Fader, and Complex, among other publications. In 2018 and 2019, she curated and produced the Chicago Music Industry Summit in partnership with Apple. In 2021, she founded the print publication Search Party Magazine, for which she serves as editor-in-chief. She now works in experiential marketing for Apple, where she has produced music and cultural programming in Chicago, Nashville, Miami, Los Angeles, and Mexico City.
Jared Witherspoon (b. 1996) is a photographer and contemporary artist based in St. Louis, Missouri. Renowned for his portraiture, typified by avant-garde fashion photography, Witherspoon typically makes use of the analog medium to give prominence to the many unorthodoxies of youth culture.
Jessie Donovan is a visual artist and software engineer from St. Louis Missouri. Her practice explores topics of categorization, language, and our perception of scientific truth. Her work was exhibited in the Luminary's "I watch for good news..." billboard exhibition, she was selected for Paul Artspace's Sister City Residency in Stuttgart, Germany, and she served as a guest curator at the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis.
Jen Wohlner was born in Illinois in 1988. She received her BFA from the University of Southern California in 2010 and will receive her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2024. Wohlner has exhibited in a solo exhibition at Wildfruit Projects in St. Louis and the Helen Lindhurst Fine Arts Gallery in Los Angeles, CA. Wohlner has been included in group exhibitions at the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood, CA and the Angad Arts Hotel in St. Louis, MO. Jen Wohlner lives and works in St. Louis, Missouri. Jen Wohlner's website is jenwohlner.com, and her Instagram is @jensface.