ABOUT LUMINARIA

Luminaria is the first annual all day and evening celebration of San Antonio premiere artists and art organizations giving citizens of the community a chance to experience the city’s diverse cultures through observing and participating in our diverse arts community. Through visual, performing, multi-media, theatre, dance, music and other artistic forms, audiences will be engaged throughout San Antonio in a celebration of the arts.

San Antonio public radio stations are proud to support this massive and vital initiative and to continue its enthusiastic support for San Antonio's arts community.

Find out more about Luminaria: Arts Night in San Antonio at www.luminariasa.com.

ART ON THE AIRWAVES

San Antonio's public radio stations unite for an evening of art, live music and literary performance in support of Luminaria Art Night in San Antonio.

Join Texas Public Radio's KSTX 89.1 FM, Trinity University's KRTU 91.7 FM, and San Antonio College's KSYM 90.1 FM for an evening that celebrates the voice of public radio, Saturday, March 15, at the Hyatt Conference Center. The live performance and art exhibition begins at 6 p.m. and goes on until midnight in conjunction with the city-funded, community-backed initiative to honor San Antonio's world-class artistic heritage. "Art on the Airwaves" is made possible by Security Service Federal Credit Union and Lucifer Lighting.

When: Saturday, March 15, 6 p.m. to midnight
Where: The Hyatt Conference Center, 518 Houston Street, San Antonio, TX 78205

Free parking for the entire Luminaria event is on a first-come, first-served basis will be located at Alamodome Parking Lot A, Durango Street city parking (across the Federal Building), and St. Marys Street garage. There will also be free VIA Trolley service from the Alamodome and Durango to the downtown event.

The evening begins with two hours of world music from Texas Public Radio's KSTX 89.1 FM, followed by jazz from KRTU and dance/industrial and alternative music from KSYM. In between musical acts, acclaimed poets from throughout the area will perform their work. Occurring concurrently with these live performances will be a visual art exhibit by nationally and internationally recognized artists Chuck Ramirez, Gary Sweeney and Katie Pell.

KPAC 89. 1FM and Luminaria: Arts Night in San Antonio

KPAC celebrates TPR’s participation in Luminaria:  Arts Night in San Antonio.  Ken Freudigman, co-founder and artistic director of Camerata, and principal cellist for the San Antonio Symphony, will preview Saturday’s arts event by playing three movements of Bach's 3rd suite for solo cello in council chambers today.  

Gary Sweeney

Gary Sweeney draws relationships between incongruous ideas and fragments of popular culture, using unusual materials and a large dose of humor. Known for works he has created from salvaged signs and old photographs, Sweeney allows some of his newer work to take a different turn. Using a router and a paintbrush with great care, he transcribes his mother‚s sloppy Joe recipe in Abraham Lincoln's handwriting, chronicles Georgia O'Keeffe's aging through the decline in her signature's legibility, and charts the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) crisis.

Sweeney gained notoriety while living in Denver, where he exhibited widely and was commissioned to create work for the International Airport‚s Main Terminal. He moved to San Antonio in 1996 and has exhibited nationally and internationally. His work is in the collections of the Denver Art Museum and the San Antonio Museum of Art, as well as many private collections.

Chuck Ramirez

As an artist and graphic designer, Ramirez processes and deconstructs the media world in which he lives. His work employs visual and conceptual techniques found in contemporary advertising and package design. Using typography and digital imaging technology, Ramirez isolates and recontextualizes familiar objects and texts to explore the human condition. Always personally relevant, Ramirez has explored cultural identity, mortality and consumerism through his photographs and installations. The images in his 1997 series, Coconut, slyly subverted stereotypes of those who cross cultural boundaries. Yet in more recent work, Ramirez resurrects waste—photographing filled garbage bags, dying flowers, and battered, empty piñatas—reflecting on the fleeting nature of human existence while imposing the will to survive.

Ramirez has shown extensively throughout the United States, Mexico and Europe. Solo and group exhibitions include the Bronx Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; El Portal del Arte Contemporáneo (ARCO) Madrid; Centro de la Imagen and Galeria O Lamm, Mexico City; Galeries Khadrberlin, Berlin; Arlington Museum of Contemporary Art, TX; Center of the Visual Arts, Denver; the Austin Museum of Art at Laguna Gloria, Austin, TX; the Institute of Visual Arts, Milwaukee; Blue Star Art Space, San Antonio; and the Elizabeth Dee Gallery, NY. He was selected for an ArtPace residency in 2001 by Jerome Sans, an independent curator and co-director of the Palais de Tokyo, Paris. He currently resides in San Antonio.

Katie Pell

Through exuberant drawing, performance projects, and comic books, Katie Pell celebrates vernacular traditions, presenting a world without taboos or boundaries—one where anything is possible for those who go beyond given conditions and just “do.” Her works irreverently explore personal, gender, and cultural identity, as well as the potential for greatness in everyone. Pell has completed two bodies of work focusing on the dormant fame in each of us. Pastel and ink drawings with titles such as The Poetic Mick (2003) and Mick from Chester (2003) use expressive color and angular lines to show ordinary people transformed into the persona of Mick Jagger. Pell also developed a large-scale hand-drawn and hand-bound comic book that humorously tells of the extraordinary impact of a Jagger apparition on the otherwise humdrum life of the artist as a teenager. In these projects and others, Pell delves into the role of fate and circumstance while creating a dichotomy between how we appear and who we would like to become.

Katie Pell has lived in san Antonio since 1995. Her work describes the excruciating negotiations needed when confronting sexism, class and racism.. She lives in the center of San Antonio with her man and daughter; dogs and chickens. She never complains about the heat.

World Music from KSTX 89.1 FM

MOMBASA CODE
Mombasa Code is a collection of musicians, artists, and scholars.  M Code blends da-da inspired jazz, world beats, and circus tunes with the use of computer sound effects.  This ensemble mixes contemporary art into their performances in a variety of ways, including: projecting interactive video; playing live musical scores to silent black and white films; performing at the local skating rink for skaters to roll to; and utilizing guest artists, dancers, or magicians to add variety to the sound where appropriate. 
Mombasa Code Website

MWENDO NUSPIRITS DRUMMERS
Mwendo is Swahili for rhythm and motion. Featuring a unique combination of vocal and percussion instruments, The Mwendo Drummers celebrating the deep pulsating rhythms of the drums and their phenomenal effect on both the listeners and performers. Their music is World-Beat, Pan-African and Latin grooves with an eclectic twist.
Mwendo Drummers Website

Jazz from KRTU 91.7 FM

ERIC REVIS 11:11
Grammy-winning bassist/composer Eric Revis has been one of the most solid and forceful voices in the contemporary jazz scene for over 15 years despite his young age. The deep-running power of his beat, his potent and gorgeous tone, and his dynamic approach to music keeps him in high demands among notable musicians such as Branford Marsalis and Jeff "Tain" Watts.
Eric Revis Website

Dance, Industrial and Alternative from KSYM 90.1 FM

HYPERBUBBLE with special guest N'BLACKOASIS
With its bionic beats and sweet female vocals, Hyperbubble's cyberpop will stick to the side of your cranium like a tasty wad of Hubba Bubba. The photogenic duo load their lyrical cannon with fast cars, fast food, 1-800 numbers and love songs to their synthesizers. To Hyperbubble, guitars are "retro", and sequencers are the key to the future. N'Black Oasis will spin dance and industrial music through midnight.
Hyperbubble Website

The Poets

BEN JUDSON
Ben Judson is a writer and web designer living in San Antonio. His poetry and reviews have been published in the Texas Observer, Art Lies, the San Antonio Express-News, and other publications. He runs Emvergeoning, a blog devoted to covering the arts in San Antonio and beyond. 

BRYCE MILLIGAN
Bryce Milligan  is the author of a dozen books for children, young adults and adults. His children's book, Brigid's Cloak (2002), was listed as best of the year by Publishers Weekly and by the Bank Street College. One of his collections of poetry, Working the Stone (1993), was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Critic Paul Christensen called his Alms for Oblivion (2003) "an important poem that breaks new ground for the contemporary long poem." Milligan's novel, With the Wind, Kevin Dolan (1987), was given the Lone Star Book Award by the Texas Library Association. Several of his plays have been produced at the Witte Museum, and two of them continue to run on a more-or-less permanent basis. As a freelance critic, Milligan is the author of over 2,000 articles and reviews. Since 1995, he has been the publisher and editor of Wings Press. Bloomsbury Review recently called him a "literary wizard."

TREY MOORE
A performance poet of San Antonio, in 2007, Trey Moore performed in Maine and Minnesota and regularly at local venues.  He teaches poetry in the schools of San Antonio, elementary, middle, and juvenile detention centers and published in several anthologies compiled by Naomi Nye, Texas Observer, Borderlands.  Most recently his collection, we forget we are water, won the Whitebird Chapbook Contest and subsequently published by Wings Press in 2006.

BEVERLY MONESTIER
San Antonio native Beverly Monestier is also a citizen of Cyprus. She's a state touring poet through Texas Commission on the Arts, poetry coach for the national Poetry Out Loud program, and runs Synergy Foundation, promoting peace and intercultural understanding through literary arts. Widely published and awarded, you can find her poems in the current editions of Southern Humanities Review, Borderlands, Palo Alto Review, New Texas, Rio Grande Review, and other journals.

DR. CARMEN TAFOLLA
Dr. Carmen Tafolla is an internationally pubished writer, poet, and performance artist, and one of the most anthologized of Latina poets in the nation.  Winner of the 1999 Art of Peace Award for writing that promotes peace, justice, and human understanding, Tafolla has four new books set for release in 2008, including a collection of short stories focused on the greater San Antonio and South Texas area, entitled The Holy Tortilla and a Pot of Beans.