What We Choose To Hold
What We Choose To Hold
12.19.2025
A Letter From the Director
Dear fellow artists, activators, and visionaries,
Early in my practice, I wrote about art as a means of learning how to live together when the world feels unstable. I’ve returned to this sentiment often in our work this year at The Luminary.
I believe in artists because they practice how to build meaning, care, and connection where it is most needed. Through this work, artists create sites of exchange, recognition, and possibility. This is the work The Luminary exists to support.
This year has been the most challenging of my leadership. We navigated unprecedented shifts in the funding landscape, catastrophic damage to our city from a historic tornado, and growing threats to the safety and stability of many of our neighbors and collaborators. Alongside and among this, we faced ongoing uncertainty about the future and format of independent, artist-led work. In my personal life, I also became a mother. Together, these experiences sharpened my understanding of what must be protected, what can be nurtured, and what truly sustains long-term work.
With a lean team of three full-time staff and operating below our originally budgeted income, The Luminary delivered a full year of ambitious programming and mutual aid. In 2025, we welcomed 17 residents to St. Louis, paid $75,000 directly to artists across exhibitions, residencies, and regranting, and presented 24 public programs and offerings, including partnerships that opened our space to smaller, mission-aligned organizations and coalitions, including weeks of community-led tornado relief efforts. Across the year, we welcomed more than 5,600 visitors through exhibitions, programs, and gatherings. This work was supported by 10 volunteers, eight studio members, and a deeply committed community working in close collaboration.
This work reflects not only care and vision, but discipline, adaptability, and stewardship. We protect communities most at risk not only through platforms and visibility, but through joy, rest, collaboration, education, and mutual aid.
At a moment when many artist-led organizations are closing their doors, The Luminary continues to hold space for art that risks, questions, and imagines otherwise. This is not accidental. It is the result of sustained commitment, careful decision-making, and the belief that independent institutions matter.
As the year draws to a close, we are reflecting on what sustains this work and what this collective care makes possible in the years ahead.
I believe in artists because I seek demonstrated change. Artists change the world by changing how we see, care, and act; first within ourselves, then with one another. Together, we can ensure that The Luminary continues to be a home for artists, ideas, and the futures we are actively preparing for.
Now more than ever, sustaining this work requires shared investment. As we approach the end of the year, we invite our community to move from one-time giving toward sustained solidarity. By becoming a member–whether at $5 a month or $50–you help ensure that The Luminary remains responsive, rigorous, and artist-led.
With gratitude,
Kalaija Mallery
Artistic & Executive Director
The Luminary