Join the Link Auditorium Gallery for our upcoming exhibition, Structural Illuminations, opening on October 2!

Open October 2, 2026 – January 10, 2027

Friday, October 2, 5-9 PM: Preview Opening

Saturday, October 3, 1-5 PM: CWE Art & Taste Gallery Walk

Friday, October 23, 7-9:30 PM: Art Afterparty with Entertainment TBD

Friday, November 13, 5-8 PM: Artist Meet & Greet

Featuring Special Presentation: 5 PM Cementland Talk by Richard Sprengeler

Saturday, November 14, 3-8 PM Art Marketplace

Sunday, January 10, 2-5 PM: Closing Art Talk

DOWNLOAD FREE TICKETS HERE

For all artwork acquisitions, please email thomasmcgrath@thelinkauditorium.org

STRUCTURAL ILLUMINATIONS

Featuring the work of:

Gary Passanise

Christina Shmigel

Richard Sprengeler

Structural Illuminations brings together three St. Louis artists working across photography, painting, and sculpture, whose practices explore the structures—physical, historical, cultural, and conceptual—that shape how we understand the world around us.

Structure is never entirely fixed. It bears the marks of what has come before, responds to forces acting upon it, and can be dismantled, reinvented, or transformed into something new. Through distinctly different approaches to image and material, these artists illuminate what lies beneath the surface of familiar places, objects, and ideas.

Richard Sprengeler examines the layered industrial history of the St. Louis region and its place within the broader Rust Belt. His work considers the buildings, infrastructure, landscapes, and remnants left behind by industries that once defined the region—from manufacturing and railroads to brewing, meatpacking, and brickmaking. As St. Louis moved through deindustrialization and renewal, these structures became evidence of economic and social change, carrying traces of communities, labor, growth, and loss. Sprengeler’s photographs invite us to look at the industrial landscape not simply as scenery, but as a record of collective memory.

Christina Shmigel investigates structure through material and transformation. Beginning with recycled honeycomb cardboard and molding plaster and incorporating asphalt pavement, her sculptural work draws from architecture, ruins, landscape, and organic growth. Images of stone structures in Puglia, bombarded buildings in Ukraine, and the persistent growth of a garden vine become part of an exploration of opposing forces: destruction and endurance, collapse and regeneration. Her materials are transformed into forms that suggest both the fragility and persistence of the structures we create.

Gary Passanise approaches structure through continual reinvention. Working fluidly across painting, construction, sculpture, and site-specific installation, he allows conceptual content to determine the medium, while historical moments and personal evolution continually inform the direction of his work. His practice resists a fixed visual language, instead embracing transformation as an essential part of the creative process. Structure, in this context, becomes something that can be reconsidered and reconstructed as experience and meaning change.

Together, the artists offer three distinct ways of seeing structure: as evidence of history, as material in transformation, and as an evolving conceptual framework. Their works encourage us to look more closely at the built and natural environments around us, and to recognize that beneath every structure are layers of time, memory, human intervention, and change.

Structural Illuminations is an invitation to see differently—to discover what becomes visible when we look beyond the surface and allow familiar structures to reveal their histories, tensions, and possibilities.

Street parking is available. These events will take place in the Gallery, on the second floor of the Link Auditorium. There is no elevator access in our 118-yr-old building. We are currently in the process of renovating to make Link accessible to all.