BmoreArt

To be clear, Villager doesn’t represent every artist drawn to Moonlight. He didn’t display any visual work at Breakthrough, the May showcase Moonlight had installed at that time. And not everyone comes to Moonlight to play music. While participating in Villager’s workshop, Artist Joshua Rogers mentioned living in Pigtown. He was drawn to Moonlight by proximity. 

Lvnar tells me that she used to work next door, in the space once occupied by Zeke’s. She let me tour the gallery, and pointed at every piece submitted by a Pigtowner.

For April’s showcase, she recalls receiving submissions from only “two or three people” outside Pigtown. Villager himself learned about the gallery while living in the area. “I lived in Pigtown, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, there’s an art gallery here,’” he says. “All the galleries are in Station North or Mt. Vernon and Charles Street.”

Lizzie-Bee, a multimedia artist, comes to Moonlight for the Sunday workshops, not the jam sessions. She’s become a regular at Coffee Cookies, and Canvas. At the showcase, she was exhibiting “The Resilience of the Tree,” an acrylic-on-canvas painting of a landscape. Right next to the painting, one of her fiber works depicted this same landscape. 

Eileen Copeland chose music as her subject matter. Her piece in the show, “Unknown Band,” was one of Lvnar’s favorites. It depicts a group of guitarists in colored pencil on 8.5″ by 11″ paper. On Breakthrough’s opening night, Moonlight was selling it for an affordable $20. 

“What we at Moonlight are striving for is to make art accessible to everyone,” Lvnar says. “Even if they have no experience making art at all, I want them to come in or come during jam night and bang a tambourine and feel what it feels like to make art and feel what it feels like to make music.”

Villager made a similar point about Moonlight’s uniqueness. “One thing that continuously stands out for me is the accessibility for artists who aren’t necessarily gallery artists. But gallery artists are showing their work here too.”

Moonlight began as a pop-up gallery. Now it’s become, in Lvnar’s words, “permanent temporarily.” So far the space is primarily supported through a grant from Pigtown Main Street, a nonprofit promoting business development. Plus, Lvnar mentioned accessing a grant through SCRAP B-More, a craft store nearby. “We’re not a nonprofit yet, but we’re going to try to become one,” she added, since it will increase Moonlight’s options for funding.

At the reception for Breakthrough, Lvnar spoke with Rogers about strategies for business development. She wants the inventory to remain current. “I want people to come in and be able to purchase the art. We’re not a museum. We’re a gallery, and usually at galleries you can purchase the artwork,” Lvnar adds. “That wouldn’t be a rule, but it’s just something that I think about. It is definitely a line.”

For June’s showcase, Liberation, Lvnar tapped artists from Make Studio in Hampden. Before the opening reception, she called a community meeting to gauge interest in starting an artists’ studio on Moonlight’s second floor. The interested parties continued talking for more than 40 minutes after the meeting’s scheduled conclusion.

This summer, Lvnar is also envisioning different exhibition models, “like an individual artist having a pop-up or a once-a-year show of the whole collective. We’re still in a pilot phase. We’re taking baby steps.”

Moonlight may be still evolving as an art gallery, but according to the event calendar in the front window, it will maintain its musical side. “The stuff that we already do is not going away,” Lvnar says. “We’ll still have our workshops upstairs. We’re still going to have jam every Wednesday.”

Find more information on Moonlight Center of Art’s exhibits, workshops, and events on Instagram.