The session will take place from April 1st through July 31st, 2019 in parallel with a large-scale public art platform, Counterpublic, which will commission artists, activists, designers, choreographers, writers, and performers to activate storefronts, parks, and gathering spaces throughout our neighborhood, embedding art directly within the everyday life of the community. This community, colloquially known as Cherokee Street, is a convergence of four of the most socio-economically and racially diverse neighborhoods in St. Louis, is historically the primary Hispanic/Latinx district in the city, and directly engages (and obscures) the indigenous histories of the region both in its name and its adjacencies to significant former Mississippian sites.

Counterpublic attempts to expand spaces of dissent, dialogue, care, and complexity within The Luminary’s immediate community through responsive commissions and intentional intersections with this space. We encourage applications that engage communal land use and neighborhood change, monument-making for marginalized communities, choreographies of resistance, and the decolonization of public space.

Projects may take the form of:

* Site-responsive installations, exhibitions, performances, screenings, durational projects and other forms to be situated in the everyday spaces of our neighborhood

* Writing and Publications to engage the session’s concept through contextual criticism, embedded critique, and responsive modes of publication

Selected residents will be commissioned to create new work or re-stage previous work that directly engages this platform. Residents will receive a stipend of up to $1,500 (depending on duration and proposed project), travel stipend, housing, and dedicated staff support. Additional project support may be available in select circumstances.

Selected Residents:

Demian DinéYazhi´

Fidencio Fifield-Perez

NIC Kay

Kimi Hanauer

Matt Joynt

Theodore Kerr

Isabel Lewis

Rodolfo Marron III

Ohad Meromi

Azikiwe Mohammed

Josh Rios

Anthony Romero

Stephanie Syjuco

Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste

Seth Weiner

Kandis Williams

Local Artist Parent Residents

Miriam Ruiz

Lynn Peemoeller

Our year-long residency session in 2018, Commoning the Institution, was composed of an assembly of artists, activists, curators, critics, collaboratives, and experimental practitioners oriented towards the commons.

For the season, we invited proposals that rethink the relationship between the individual and the institution, asking questions such as: How does an artist, critic, or curator reshape an institution’s practice, its publics, or its politics? How do practices of care and collaboration reshape the institution? How do we work past the individual economies of the art world and advance new conceptions of the commons? And, finally, how do the forms of organizing in or as art institutions model new ways of working, new communities, and new constitutions? Selected participants proposed to rewrite our institutional language, host VR summits on alternative practices, initiate conversations on feminist arts organizing, and imagine prefigurative forums for art's funding, creation, and circulation.

Throughout the year-long exploration, we will convene conversations, exhibitions, publications, and public interventions to offer a series of exercises, footholds, and forward movements towards an arts institution of the commons. In this, the residency is itself multiple, as we all are, and operates within, outside, and, at times, against the singular institution of The Luminary, resisting a celebration of CV’s and instead working towards alternate strategies. This is the official list of participants, but there is a much larger cohort of the commons to be mobilized and matured, including perhaps - you.

Commoning the Institution Residents

Caitlin Berrigan

Brett Bloom + Bonnie Fortune

Imani Jacqueline Brown

Alison Burstein

Paul Druecke

Brian Droitcour

Sonya Dyer

Taraneh Fazeli

Sam Gould

Kimi Hanaeur

Allison Lacher

Lucy Lopez

Matt Siegle

Tereza Stejskalova

Aaron Walker & Chris Reeves

Nicholas Wylie

Yan Xing

Throughout 2017, The Luminary is hosting a special residency session supporting the work of 8 leading St. Louis artists. The Luminary will support the group individually and collectively through studio space, visits with critics and curators, participation in exhibitions, consultation, documentation, archiving, writing and more in response to the shifting needs and concerns of the participants. The session is an experiment in direct care and communal collaboration, asking how we as an institution can share not only our resources, but our power to better serve black artists in particular in this critical moment for our city and nation’s history, as well as be interrogated ourselves to learn together towards new institutional forms.

Inaugural participants in the program are Lyndon Barrois Jr., Addoley Dzegede, Jen Everett, Kahlil Irving, Dani and Kevin McCoy (WORK/PLAY), De Nichols, and Katherine Simóne Reynolds.

Support for the Special Session Residency came from the Arts and Education Council PNC Project Grant.

Our second exchange is organized with artists, curators and organizations based in and around Florence, Italy. In the first half of August 2014, the Italian open collective Radical Intention (Valerio del Baglivo, Maria Pecchioli and Aria Spinelli) will be hosted in St. Louis as residents at The Luminary (in collaboration with Temporary Art Review) and in rural central Missouri as guests for our inaugural edition of FLOAT, an annual, off-site, short-term workshop residency. In the second half of August, The Luminary Co-directors and St. Louis-based collaboration US English (James and Brea McAnally) will participate in Decompression Gathering Summer Camp, a week of decompression, communal living and group working, organized by Radical Intention, and be hosted at Corniolo Art Platform (in collaboration with FOSCA) in the Mugello Valley near Florence, Italy.

This International Exchange Program is supported in part by DE.MO./MOVIN’UP’, as part of the I session of MOVIN’UP 2014, curated by the MINISTERO DEI BENI E DELLE ATTIVITA’ CULTURALI E DEL TURISMO, Direzione Generale per il paesaggio, le belle arti, l’architettura e l’arte contemporanee, Direzione Generale per lo spettacolo dal vivo, and GAI – Associazione per il Circuito dei Giovani Artisti Italiani; Pulitzer Arts Foundation for Marfa Dialogues/St. Louis (MD/STL); ideaXfactory, an Artplace America project; and the St. Louis Regional Arts Commission.

Our inaugural exchange was organized with artists and organizations in Copenhagen, Denmark. Summer 2013 St. Louis-based artist, critic and curator Daniel McGrath (AiR ‘12) was hosted in Denmark at the Copenhagen Artist in Residency (CPH AIR) Program with an exhibition at Sydhavn Station in July, a new artist-run exhibition space for contemporary art located in an active train station. Fall 2013 Copenhagen-based artist and curator Heidi Hove (a member of Sydhavn Station) was hosted in St. Louis, MO at The Luminary with an exhibition at Isolation Room/Gallery Kit, an exhibition venue located within Daniel McGrath and Dana Turkovic’s dining room.

This International Exchange Program is supported in part by the City of Copenhagen and The Danish Arts Council.

FLOAT was an annual, off-site, short-term gathering that will utilize innovative residency structures to create intensive points of exchange. Each year’s weeklong intensive FLOAT will have a different theme explored in conjunction with a guest artist or curator, and will always involve time spent on a river. Currently inactive.

FLOAT 2015: Tactical Walking Camp [An Imperative to Map]

FLOAT 2014: [Collective] Isolation with Radical Intention

Generous support for the residency program comes from the Crawford Taylor Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, Regional Arts Commission, and The Luminary's members.