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Frank Di Piazza
James and Brea McAnally
The McAnallys sit on a stack of drywall a few weeks before The Luminary’s opening.
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Frank Di Piazza
James and Brea McAnally
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Frank Di Piazza
James and Brea McAnally
The McAnallys in what was formerly the head shop, and now Brea's photo studio.
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Frank Di Piazza
The Luminary: The Rehab Process
The first volunteer workday to rehab the space took place on December 8, 2012. Volunteers included friends, neighbors, and the occasional folks who showed up out of the blue, including a young guy who worked at a nearby grocery store. The McAnallys were at the space every day, doing what work they could do themselves—especially “the stuff we didn’t want to ask anyone else to do,” James says. They worked through last summer’s heat and this past winter’s cold.
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Frank Di Piazza
The Luminary During Rehab
When James came home covered in soot and grime one day, a neighbor kid asked if he’d been burned up in a fire. In October, during the white heat of construction, Brea revealed an amazing discovery they’d made while pulling gobs of old insulation out of the ceilings. “How do you remove fiberglass particles?” she asks with a laugh. “White vinegar. We have a bottle of it sitting in our shower now.”
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Frank Di Piazza
The Luminary During Rehab
The interior of The Luminary, earlier in 2014.
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Frank Di Piazza
The Luminary's First Exhibit
Artist Jesse Hlebo made the work for this show on-site, using drywall, Grip-Rite drywall screws, insulation, Quikrete, BP gasoline, and an AmeriGas propane torch—“which creates soot, basically,” he explains. Sometimes, five or six people would help him roll assembled sections of wall down the sidewalk, so he could work on them on a concrete pad around back. “I think the materials and the general aesthetic work really work well within the space,” Brea says. Visible in the shots of the main gallery: Developer (for Greg), Straight-Edge (for Justin), and GHE20G0TH1K (for Jazmin). The last of the three uses the building’s old Walgreens door.
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Frank Di Piazza
The Luminary's First Exhibit
Hlebo stands in front of Forbearance (for Brea, Chris, Hannah, James, Mercedes). The Luminary’s current show, “Speculative Spaces::Working Theses,” runs through August 8. One piece, Jason Lazarus’ The Search, a white, 10-foot-high hollow ziggurat, will stay for the rest of the year. “People can go inside it and sit down and have a conversation,” James says. “Everyone will sign a logbook, but then nothing else is documented. It’s a way to create a very private, intimate space in a public place.”
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Frank Di Piazza
The Luminary's First Exhibit
During the opening reception, gallery attendants gathered empty bottles from beer-drinking visitors, then stuffed them with rags to resemble Molotov cocktails, arranging them on the floor in front of Hlebo’s works, including Duplex (for Marianne)," shown above. “A 6-year-old got it,” Brea says. “He was like, ‘So are you going to blow stuff up tomorrow?’ I was simultaneously impressed and freaked out.”
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Frank Di Piazza
The Luminary
The Luminary’s new storefront at 2701 Cherokee once housed a Walgreens, a head shop, and an LED-light manufacturer. The McAnallys knew right away that they wanted the front of the building to be welcoming to the community. “We literally wanted it to be a no-barriers entry,” James says. “And even if people don’t walk in,” Brea adds, “they can see in really easily.”
The Luminary Center for the Arts opened in 2007 in a former convent on Reber Place. It faced Tower Grove Park on the Kingshighway Boulevard side, which made it a bit hard to park. Yet within a year of opening, it had established itself as one of the city’s most important visual-arts spaces, as well as a crucial concert venue. Its Elevator Music Series brought bands to St. Louis—Cults, Of Montreal—that might’ve skipped over us otherwise.
Husband-and-wife co-founders Brea and James McAnally are artists and musicians in their own right, from the beginning managing to make creative works of their own while booking rock shows and organizing exhibits—as well as managing artists’ studios, booking artist residencies, and running an artist-equipment library, AV. They also founded FORM, a contemporary design show; started Temporary Art Review, a website that’s both a forum for contemporary-art criticism and a network for artists and artists’ communities; and in 2010, created the Post Performance Series, a free series in Old Post Office Plaza that encouraged collaborations between St. Louis artists and musicians.
When the McAnallys began working on the space at 2701 Cherokee in 2012, they kept many of the programs going. They used a loaned gallery space at 2644 Cherokee and booked musicians in guest spaces. (Bonnie “Prince” Billy, for instance, played at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.) Meanwhile, they worked on the building every day, ripping out three ceilings, several layers of nasty carpet, linoleum and rotten flooring, and walls. Last October, when the space had become sufficiently friendly, they hoisted some temporary drywall and kicked off “We Are,” a series of seven weeklong exhibitions from local artists and curators. The first was photographer David Johnson’s “Your Walls Aren’t That White,” which featured images of The Luminary’s space in progress.
It was hard to miss the jubilant tone of the email invitation that went out a few weeks before The Luminary’s May 17 grand opening. It noted that the building was the result of “two years of work, 2,000-plus hours of volunteer labor, a 17,000-square-foot building, hundreds of individual donations, thousands of words of encouragement,” and of course, “countless cups of coffee.”
The Luminary (the rest of the old name’s been dropped) opened its first shows a week later: Jenny Holzer’s “MONEY CREATES TASTE,” a single silver spoon in a clear case, and “Punitive Embers” by New York artist Jesse Hlebo. The photographs above, taken over several months by Frank Di Piazza, documents the building during rehab, as well as work from that first exhibit.
The building—actually three buildings glommed together and redesigned into a logical, flowing space by local architecture firm UIC—now houses gallery and concert space, art studios, offices, Brea’s photography business, and apartments for artists’ residencies, with artist Sarrita Hunn directing the program. Concert manager Liz Deichmann has booked shows for the rest of the year, including How to Dress Well on September 22 and Mutual Benefit on October 27. And there’s probably a lot more on the docket by now than there was at press time. Visit theluminaryarts.com for the latest on exhibits, concerts, and more.
