Photograph by Samantha Dittmann
It was a convent, actually,” James McAnally explains as he creaks open a door to show off a tiny room filled with elaborate ecumenical cabinetry. “You’ll notice little things, like places where they prepared communion…”
“Now there are artist studios in the spaces that the nuns lived in,” adds his wife, Brea. “They all have a closet and a sink and a window, which is perfect. I mean, how many people want a sink in their office? Not many!”
In 2007, when the McAnallys moved here with the intention of starting an alternative, artist-run gallery and studio, the nuns had long since packed their Samsonites and moved out. Despite the dust on the windowsills, it was a lovely space, with a front stone stairway flanked by curly, harplike banisters, an echoey chapel, a kitchen, and of course those wee dormitory rooms with sinks. The McAnallys wisely started small, cleaning and painting two rooms and holding just modest art events. They also came up with a name: The Luminary Center for the Arts.
“I love naming things,” James says. “I’m a writer, so that’s my thing. We came up with this list of different options, and once we came across that one, it was like—that’s it. Because it speaks to what we want to do: The word means a leader in the field, but it’s also visual, it ties into luminaries, the milk jugs with candles inside—”
“Or paper bags,” Brea nods, clearly happier with the aesthetics of brown paper (she is, for the record, a photographer, and so therefore finely attuned to the difference between candlelight filtered through plastic versus paper). “We are really based on collaboration, not just with artists but with people who don’t know that they can be artful,” she says. “There’s always something that everyone can come in and add to. Whether it’s adding fingerprints or letters and words on transparencies, or giving people magazine pages and saying, ‘Write a New Year’s resolution on this, by circling the words that are here.’”
The Luminary was, she says, “sort of a private, introverted community” until recently, as she and James slowly worked their way through the main floor of the building, cleaning and painting and creating a series of specific work spaces. There’s the bright, airy classroom, used mainly for weekly painting classes for at-risk kids, but also rented to local arts groups like the Weavers’ Guild; the chapel, used for art installations; and the dining room, which has been transformed into a café-library that’s open to the public during the afternoon, with coffee, Wi-Fi, and a library of art books assembled by resident artist Christina Choe, who wangled donations from the Kemper and the Saint Louis Art Museum.
“One of the things we did to make this room more public and usable for people who maybe are just walking in is to put in an altered-book workstation,” Brea says. “We’ve got resources so you can just kinda cut and paste and build part of a story, and you’re just adding to what other people have done, so it’s a collaborative project.”
Both McAnallys are also musicians and play together under the name The Mirror Stage. She’s a multi-instrumentalist trained in opera; he sings and plays both left- and right-handed guitar (and writes lyrics—his degree is in poetry). So not too surprisingly, the Luminary curates monthly concerts, dubbed the Elevator Music Series. Those take place downstairs in a space used by the parish that owns the building—but it’s far from the stereotypical church basement. With its sleek, polished floors and customized sound, lighting, and video systems, it’s probably one of the best concert venues in the city.
“We built movable walls and put in track lighting so we have flexibility,” James notes, “and we’re able to hang [art]work. For our next installation piece, we’ll have 40 analog televisions and video installations.” For concerts, they use the front- and rear-projection systems to project images Brea designs for each concert, which always feature a local band and a national touring band, specifically one that would not have stopped in St. Louis otherwise.
“We’re trying to show that both visual art and music can play on the same playground,” Brea says, “because often one is neglected or one is valued over the other, so it’s nice to bring both in and treat them as equal.” And by the same token, James says he’d like to see the boundaries blurred between artist and audience and between high and low art.
“We’re trying to create a middle ground,” he says. “St. Louis has such a great museum culture. But it also has great DIY artist-run spaces like Open Lot. But unless you’re in that and know the people running these small galleries, you’re going to feel out of place. And in the museums, sometimes you just feel distant. So we feel like a balance of those elements is what we’re trying to achieve, and also use it as a resource to teach people how to experience art well, so they can participate and know that as an audience and a viewer they are bringing something to this. That is something that art theorists talk about—but it rarely trickles down to the experience of a gallery or a museum.”
“Whenever I come here, I feel like I give and I receive,” Brea adds. “So it’s largely based on interacting and making it an accessible place. We really just want to base that on community and people in different mediums—learning together.”
The Luminary Center for the Arts (theluminaryarts.com) is located at 4900 Reber Place. Hours are 2 to 7 p.m. Tue and Wed, 2 to 9 p.m. Thu, and noon to 5 p.m. Sat. On August 8, the center opens “When We Build, Let Us Think That We Build Forever,” which includes both an exhibit of local and national artists and a large-scale, outdoor installation on Kingshighway designed for community collaboration; its focus will be on city-building, including natural and unnatural factors that put cities at risk.
