Beneath the City, a World
The Luminary, St. Louis, MO
January 16 - March 7, 2026
Curated by Jameson Paige
Featuring work by: Aru Apaza, Marcellus Armstrong, Jen Everett, Jesús Hilario-Reyes, Zach Hill, Dalila Sanabria, Vanessa Leiva Santos, Kellen Wright, and Guanyu Xu
The fabric of cities has always been characterized by a boiling variability. In Beneath the City, a World, “the city” becomes a framework and departure point for artists negotiating spatial politics, architectures of memory, and ephemeral environments charged with libidinal energies. The exhibition presents nine artists attending to queer and trans methods of expressing in-betweenness through interventions in space—the becoming of two or more things at once; the stitching together of multiple landscapes; the imprint of several temporal encounters condensed into a singular form. Artworks navigate from abstracted, coded exterior and public worlds, toward interiorities that come into clearer focus, leaning toward representations of intimacy, archives, and desire. Inspiration for the show comes from the unfortunate evaporation of queer spaces in St. Louis and elsewhere, drawing attention to the increasingly transient and iterative ways queer and trans people organize themselves spatially.
Confronting what contemporary urbanists term urban perfection or “smooth cities”— sanitized, generic and homogenous new neighborhoods that continue to replace and replicate—the exhibition defiantly draws out the grainy and sedimentary surfaces of the imperfect worlds we move through. These surfaces of experience incite greater complexity, spontaneity, and variegated pleasures to publicly erupt. Beneath the City, a World celebrates artists engaged in the messy, unevenness of queer experience and the transitory built environments that harbor its intimacies, erotics, memories, and futures. Their works bring a visual and material lexicon to the sensations, impulses, and entanglements that structure queer and urban life. Taken together, the exhibition aims to elevate the continuous change in cities and landscapes as a given, and identify how artists are poetically engaged with the spatial politics and practices that constitute them.
