Moving Stories: Participatory Ritual with Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya

Opening and Participatory Ritual with Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya

Opening Reception
In-Person

Saturday, Feb 3rd, 2024
2:30pm CST

Opening reception 2-5pm

The Luminary is pleased to invite you to the opening of Moving Stories In The Making: An Exhibition of Migration Narratives, featuring the work of resident artist, Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya. Amanda will be conducting a participatory ritual with her installation: “Of Soil and Sky” opening the exhibition on February 3rd, 2024 from 2-5PM at The Luminary. 

During her residency at The Luminary, Amanda will finalize her new installation “Of Soil and Sky,” named after a poem written about her time spent in the Summer of 2023 in 40 different textile communities across every region of Thailand. This monumental work celebrates the many threads of experience that shape us, the objects that remind us of who we are, and the roads we’ve traveled to find and cultivate belonging. 

The ritual, coinciding with the exhibition’s opening reception, will allow participants to inscribe their treasured stories on slips of paper and store them in vessels that carry significance of home and inheritance. These will be incorporated into the installation and will remain as part of this living monument, a steadfast archive, for the duration of the show. 

During her stay in St. Louis, Amanda will also be presenting an artist talk on February 1st at 5:30PM in Washington University’s Steinberg Auditorium. We hope that you can make it to these wonderful events to meet Amanda and join us in celebrating the opening of this new exhibition. 

Amanda is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, and activist born in Atlanta to Thai and Indonesian immigrants and is now based in Brooklyn. Her work in sculpture, textile, public art, and ritual has reclaimed space in museums and galleries, at protests and rallies, on buildings, in classrooms, and on the cover of TIME. Her work examines the unseen labor of women, amplifies AAPI narratives, and affirms the depth, resilience and beauty of communities of color. Amanda has been artist-in-residence with the NYC Commission on Human Rights and sits on the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities where she advises the President on how art can foster community well-being.

From Amanda’s website: 

“Amanda’s work transforms everyday spaces into spheres of healing and monuments of belonging. Her process draws upon community contribution and personal narrative to shape portals made of textile, metal, wood, and dreams: an ecosystem of reciprocity between the artist and her communities. Through ceremony and ritual, delicate moments of connection and unexpected vulnerability emerge—creating a path to expansive thinking and new possibilities.”