LUMINA Art & Artists
Biltmore Park Tree Sculptures
by Cristin Searles
Cristin Searles is a practicing sculpture and installation artist, and a non-profit and art museum professional. She primarily works with fabric to hand sew delicate large scale installations made of silks, glass beads and wire often inspired by botanical imagery and patterns found in nature.
A surprising outlet of creative expression came in the form of the illuminated sculptures she and her husband began making for the tree in front of their home during the holidays many years ago. The neighborhood’s enjoyment of these sculptures was amplified when the Hope Street Merchants Association commissioned her to make several original sculptures for the trees along Hope Street during the holidays. For several years, these playful sculptures constructed out of chicken wire and mini-lights have aimed to inspire giggles and spark joy. She is thrilled to create five cheerful new sculptures for Illumina 2025!
Searles holds a BA in Studio Art with Honors, from Hamilton College, Clinton, NY, and an MFA in Sculpture from the School of Visual Arts, New York, NY. She is currently the Managing Director of the Providence Children’s Film Festival and a consultant for non-profit executives, and previously was the Director of Community Engagement for the Newport Art Museum for 9 years. She lives and works in Providence.
River Portal III
Chroma Council 2025
Chroma Council is a production company providing art direction, art handling and fabrication services. Chroma Council creates public art and provides technical support for various creative installations. The company is owned and operated by principal designers Quinn Corey, MFA and Linsey Wallace, MFA in collaboration with a rich community of creatives in Providence, RI.
River Portal III, 2025
Wood, Rope, Foam, Plexiglass, Phosphorescent Paint, Solar LED
River Portal III is a public art piece produced by Chroma Council, designed and fabricated by Linsey Wallace for Lumina 2025 in Providence, RI. This work is part of an ongoing dialogue with the “Providence River” being a conduit for communal and terrestrial memory. In this iteration the illuminated portal acts as a window for the imagination to enter the river to a narrative led by the viewer.
Manifest Destiny
by Bláithín Haddad
Water, Water Everywhere, Nor a Drop to Drink
by Saberah Malik
Saberah Malik, Warwick, bridges a cultural passion for textiles with a BFA, MFA from, Lahore’s Panjab University, Pakistan, and Industrial Design (MID) from Pratt Institute, New York. Her practice is a fluid compendium of her formative years and later life experiences, anchoring her work in cross cultural spaces, addressing fractured lineages, heritage and socio-environmental injustices. Engineering flat fabric into luminous, ethereal, architectural or biomorphic forms, she creates luminosity and material reflectivity garnering self-reflection, identity, potential, possibility and change.
Artist's Statement
I am passionate about textiles in all their ceremonial and functional uses, in their sensuous physicality, visual opulence, and possibilities for manipulation. I explore textiles and related craft histories from earliest recovered fabric fragments, to how textiles have shaped and impacted almost every aspect of our cultures and civilizations. Following new technologies, I search alternate fabrics for dimensional shaping. Through stitching, shaping, assembling, I re-integrate broken genealogy, heritage, and humanity across constrained cross-border relationships. Engineering flat fabric into luminous architectural and biomorphic forms, I capture the impermanence of artifacts, and of life. Filtering through translucent shapes, reflecting off surfaces, light is a physical presence within my work, threading identity, potential, change and possibility as metaphysical counterparts.
Crafting luminous sculpture through meditative rhythms of a slow process, I understand self through life’s everyday shapes: bottles and cans as containers of family histories, as vessels of nostalgia, longing, absences; stones as witnesses to broken boundaries, artificial borders, family milestones markers. Pairing post-storm debris with shaped textiles, I connect to nature from microscopic plankton to giant trees, addressing parallels within human power structures that decide our geo-political and planetary futures.
I create order amidst chaos, serenity amidst turmoil, joy in perceiving objects magically transubstantiated into ethereal iterations of hope. My work embodies light irrespective of how dark the circumstances, especially traumatic losses and displacements through war and natural disasters.
"Water, water everywhere, nor a drop to drink" is supported in part by a grant from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, through an appropriation by the Rhode Island General Assembly and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
The Chromatic Visitor
by Max Van Lorimer
Max Van Lorimer reshapes human perception through abstract geometry, light, and color. His immersive installations and mixed-media unpaintings explore the interplay between materiality and the ephemeral, challenging our understanding of space and scale.
Drawing from particle physics, quantum mechanics, and optical phenomena, Van Lorimer’s work acts as a portal into the unseen forces shaping our universe. As he expands into multi-modal sculptural installations, his relentless inquiry continues—pushing the boundaries of art, science, and perception.
Artist's Statement
In The Chromatic Visitor, I explore the interplay of form, texture, light, and consciousness by synthesizing clashing elements into harmonious compositions. These processes involve computational and material challenges that fuel experimentation and innovation in my practice.
The work examines tensions between human constructs and natural forces, expressed through varied textures: rough, scarred surfaces contrast with diffusive mists and distortive prisms. Light becomes both medium and metaphor, revealing hidden dynamics and layered interactions, inviting viewers to engage with dissonances between nature, technology, and perception.
At its core, The Chromatic Visitor reflects my inquiry into how generative computational processes and augmented cognition reshape relationships between individuals and complex systems. By deploying light, material, and color as conceptual tools, the work challenges viewers to look beyond initial impressions, encouraging deeper reflection on broader implications.
The Eye of Providence
by Jessica Ricci and Benjamin Giguere
The Eye of Providence is a meditation on divine vision, human inspiration, and the interplay between the seen and the unseen. Cast delicate Italian lace into glass, this work embodies the idea of God’s omniscient gaze—watching, guiding, and inspiring creation itself. Through the fusion of fragile textile and solid glass, we explore the tension between permanence and impermanence, between the ephemeral nature of inspiration and the enduring legacy of faith and creativity.
Inspiration for this piece draws deeply from the history of Providence, Rhode Island, and its founder, Roger Williams. Williams, in seeking a place of true religious freedom, named the city “Providence” in acknowledgment of divine guidance and the belief that his journey was not mere happenstance, but an act of grace. The Eye of Providence pays homage to this idea—expressing how inspiration is bestowed, how creation is channeled through the artist into the matrix of reality, and how faith and artistry intertwine.
The intricate lace patterns symbolize the complex and interconnected fabric of life, knowledge, and divine wisdom passed down from mother to child, now immortalized in glass—a material that, like faith, is both transparent and reflective. As the eye observes, it reminds us of our role as makers, dreamers, and seekers, shaping the world while being shaped by forces greater than ourselves.
This work invites viewers to consider their own connection to creation, to Providence in all its meanings, and to the invisible threads that weave through history, art, and faith.
I ONLY WORK HERE
by Tiffiniy Yingus Cheng
Tiffiniy Yingus Cheng (ngai) does experimental jokes as performance art, brought the pop-up restaurant as live action for our age in 2007 and developed a new model of political strategy behind some of the largest online protests in history, and has some poems published. She’s Ngai/MA, born in Macau as a boat person.
Artist's Statement
"While you wait to hear if they'll pay your claim, there is almost nothing like the silent buzz at the other end of the line. Or when you say something that requires a response and the world says back, "no worries". There's an art to miscommunication, unthinking, the void, and the customer service call. Phoning it in might just be a necessary part of life."
Next Stop, LUMINA!
by @MADink401
@MADink401 (Maguire Art Design) Father, Artist, Teacher, Advocate. Civil Rights Cartoonist. One line at a time. Born and raised in Ocean State. Peace.
Light Lane with Music by Kufa Castro!
Kufa Castro, an Afro-Dominican artist based in Providence, blends music, poetry, and playwriting to explore identity, culture, and community. Since 2012, he has fused his experiences as an Afro-Latinx immigrant into his art, creating powerful, thought-provoking work.
Now, his music is featured in the Light Lane installations, on display from February 1-17! Don’t miss this immersive experience—check it out and celebrate Kufa’s incredible artistry.
