Luminaria Festival in downtown San Antonio in 2019. (Charles Cima, Charles Cima/Flickr Creative Commons)
SAN ANTONIO – Luminaria celebrates contemporary art with edgy installations and performances in downtown San Antonio each year.
The nonprofit organization is dedicated to helping promote the arts in San Antonio through the Luminaria Contemporary Arts festival, the Luminaria Artist Foundation Grants Program.
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Tuesday, the Luminaria Artist Foundation Grants Program announced its list of grant award winners with $54,000 going to seven Bexar County artists to help them create original work in literary, visual and performing arts - some of which is expected to be on display during this year’s Luminaria festival on Nov. 13.
Three artists received grant awards worth $10,000 - musician Jeremy Kingg, poet and storyteller Eddie Vega and multidisciplinary artist Guillermina Zabala.
Tejana writer Marisela Barrera, filmmaker Justin Rodriguez, visual artist Adriana Garcia and artist DeAnna Brown were all granted awards of $6,000 each.
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Jeremy Kingg is a musician whose music is heavily inspired by nature. He is continually experimenting to find and refine his sonic expression. Kingg seeks to amplify the energy transfer that happens between all living beings using his words to mingle his experiences with his listeners’ own inner battles with change and the desire for balance between head and heart. His explorations of the world around him have led him to open mics, house shows, dive bars, as well as the big-name venues San Antonio has to offer. Join this journey of growth, chasing balance and always spreading love and light.
DeAnna Brown is an artist and the founder/CEO of Forward Progress Arts & Entertainment Center, Inc. At Forward Progress, Brown has worked with young talented people for over 30 years encouraging them to pursue their God given talent, believe in their dreams, and prosper in their purpose through such programs as an online talent show, a television talk/variety program, and the Arrows in Motion incubator space for creative writers. A founder of the San Antonio Black International Film Festival, Brown was a producer for and actress in the 2018 film “Breaking Brokenness,” for which she won over 18 awards, including two Best Actress awards and a Best of Fest Acting Award.
Marisela Barrera is a Tejana writer, performer, director, and educator with a BFA in Acting from Southern Methodist University and MA/MFA degrees in Creative Writing, Literature, and Social Justice from Our Lady of the Lake University. Her work provides intersections of Tejana, Chicana, Méxicana, and Gothic identities through the short stories, profiles, and nonfiction essays she writes and turns into performances. Her protagonists are “mujer malas, women who rebel against cultural expectations while at the same time embracing the duality of Tejana-Méx border life and the complexity of female roles of mother, lover, and Virgen.” All of her characters, to various degrees, are “isolated and searching for a place of comfort, a place to call home.”
Eddie Vega, known as Eddie V., is a poet, spoken word artist, storyteller, and educator originally from the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas. Vega’s poetry is known for its direct style, clever word-play, social justice themes, and incorporation of Tejano culture and language. He’s published several chapbooks and one full-length collection of poetry, “Chicharra Chorus” (Flower Song Press, 2019). Vega garnered the bid for San Antonio to host the 2018 Southern Fried Poetry Slam, and at the 2017 National Poetry Slam, he helped the San Antonio Puro Slam team bring home 3rd Place in Group Piece Finals and won 2nd place individually in the Haiku Death Match. His poetry has been displayed on VIA buses and downtown San Antonio buildings.
Adriana Garcia is a home-grown San Antonio visual artist, muralist, and illustrator whose works have been exhibited locally and nationally. Her debut picture book All Around Us (text by Xelena Gonzalez, Cinco Puntos Press) was awarded the prestigious 2018 Pura Belpré Honor for illustration, and her second book Where Wonder Grows (by the same author and press) is set to come out May 2021. One of Garcia's favorite mural creations, Changing the World, is installed at Northwest Vista College and focuses on access to education while her mural De Todos Caminos Somos Todos Uno, completed for the San Antonio River Authority, was recognized in the 2019 Public Art Network Year in Review.
Guillermina Zabala was born in Argentina and is a multidisciplinary artist and educator whose art examines the intersection between the individual and their social-political-cultural environment. Her works have been exhibited in museums and art galleries in Los Angeles, New York, Texas, Miami, and San Francisco; and internationally in Germany, Latin America, and Spain. Because of her recurrent use of text in her artwork, Zabala was a guest speaker at the McNay’s “Language Is a Virus” while her solo video exhibit I, Me, Light was on display. She’s the first recipient of the Bishwanath and Sandhya Sinha Memorial Fellowship in Media Studies at The New School where she will be addressing the topics of media, migration, and creativity.
Justin Rodriguez was born and raised in San Antonio and started his filmmaking career by creating musical scores. In 2017, Rodriguez created his own production company, Brave Pictures, and wrote, edited, directed, and produced his first film, “LUSH,” which gained multiple film festival selections across the country. In 2019, Rodriguez won the San Antonio Filmmaker grant for his second film “Glossolalia,” which also won the Best Texas Short Award at the El Paso Media Fest and is now on Amazon Prime. Rodriguez was recently selected for the Emerging Content Creator Scholarship for the Latino Media Fest 2020 (Los Angeles) sponsored by Netflix.
Jeremy Kingg is a musician whose music is heavily inspired by nature. He is continually experimenting to find and refine his sonic expression. Kingg seeks to amplify the energy transfer that happens between all living beings using his words to mingle his experiences with his listeners’ own inner battles with change and the desire for balance between head and heart. His explorations of the world around him have led him to open mics, house shows, dive bars, as well as the big-name venues San Antonio has to offer. Join this journey of growth, chasing balance and always spreading love and light.
A panel of judges for the grants program scored and selected artists based on their artistic excellence and proposed project description, according to Luminaria officials.
“COVID-19 was a devastating blow to all industries, especially to the arts, which directly impacts the tourism economy of San Antonio,” said Luminaria executive director Yadhira Lozano. “Thanks to our generous donors, we are able to increase funding dollars in record time to help these artists survive financially as our city begins to recover.”
Americans for the Arts estimates that COVID-19 cost $16 billion in losses for nonprofit arts and culture organizations nationally.
The 2021 Luminaria Artist Foundation Grants Program awarded the highest amount of grants, to date, for the nonprofit arts organization. The grant period ends in March 2022 when funded projects, which have yet to be announced, will be completed.
