LUMONICS

Light & Sound Gallery — Denver, Colorado
www.lumonics.net

Origin

Lumonics began in 1969, when artists Mel Tanner (1925–1993) and Dorothy Tanner (1923–2020) opened the Lumonics Light and Sound Theatre in Miami and began fusing light sculpture, music, and live multi-sensory performance into a single art form. Dorothy and Mel  each brought formal training to the collaboration — she studied sculpture under instructors including Chaim Gross and Milton Hebald, and drawing under Gabor Peterdi, at institutions including the Educational Alliance and the Brooklyn Museum Art School. Mel Tanner, after serving in combat in World War II, enrolled at Pratt Institute and the Brooklyn Museum Art School under the new G.I. Bill. His instructors included the famous Max Beckmann and John Ferren, who had assisted Pablo Picasso in Paris in the 1930s. The Tanners met at the Brooklyn Museum in 1949. That educational grounding later shaped the couple’s collaborative approach: rather than treating light as a stage effect, they sculpted it into geometric forms and lighted them from within — expanding what both “lighting” and “sculpture” could mean. The collective later relocated to Denver, where it is now recognized as one of the first and longest continuously running light-art studios in the United States, predating today’s immersive-art movement by decades.

The Tanners began their light art at the same time as the later to be named Light and Space art movement got underway in southern California. Some of the artists included Robert Irwin, Larry Bell, and James Turrell. Light and Space had affiliation with art schools and industry, whereas the Tanners were very isolated from the art world in Miami at that time, and were not aware of the movement they were part of.

In 1972, Barry Raphael and Marc Billard, separately walked into the Tanners’ Miami gallery and were captivated; Raphael  was the first to join, followed shortly by Billard, who apprenticed under longtime studio assistant Pete Adams. That meeting launched a collaboration that has now spanned more than five decades. The group grew into a working art collective of Mel and Dorothy Tanner, Marc Billard, Barbara Billard, Barry Raphael, Jocelyn Tanner, and Louise Dillon, producing hundreds of light sculptures and an evolving body of video and electronic music under the Lumonics name.

The work has also earned formal art-historical recognition: in 2005, art historian Michael Betancourt devoted a full book to it, The Lumonics Theater: The Art of Mel & Dorothy Tanner, describing the collective’s fusion of sculpture, light, video, and sound as a Gesamtkunstwerk — a unified “total artwork.” That framing has anchored critical understanding of Lumonics ever since.

The Art Form & Mission

Lumonics is built on a simple but ambitious idea: that light, music, projection, and space, experienced together, can shift how a person feels and thinks. Dorothy and Mel Tanner’s sculptures — geometric and free-form,  luminous, hand-built — are staged with layered video projection and original electronica/world-music composition (a practice Dorothy began with Marc Billard in 1993) to create an environment meant to relax the body while awakening the mind. Many sculptures have since been converted to LED and run on a DMX lighting control system, letting today’s stewards choreograph light, video, and music together in real time while preserving the original hand-built forms. The collective’s long-running public program, Lumonics Immersed, carries that mission forward every week, and the group has extended it through Lumonics Mind Spas (relaxation- and creativity-focused installations for public and private spaces) and the Lumonics School of Light Art, which has taught hands-on light-sculpture classes to students from age 8 to 85.

The mission has also included community access: Lumonics partners with the Denver Public Schools Foundation on student field trips and art classes, Sample Supports to host monthly sessions for developmentally-challenged adults, and with The Phoenix to offer a substance-free, sober community experience. The work’s therapeutic quality has also drawn institutional use beyond the gallery: Tanner/Billard video productions have been used in the psychology department at Nova Southeastern University and in the bio-feedback program at a national addiction-treatment center.

The Collection

The Lumonics collection comprises more than 200 original light sculptures by Mel and Dorothy Tanner, along with an extensive archive of collages, sketchbooks, hand-painted 35mm slides, original projector-tray paintings, press coverage, photographs, and music/video work. Roughly 75 sculptures rotate on display in the Lumonics gallery in Denver at any given time. Eleven pieces have been selected as limited editions, offered in support of the collection’s Lumonics Legacy Project.

Recognition & Continued Impact

• Denverite has described Lumonics as one of the very first and longest-standing light-art studios in the country, established long before immersive art became a cultural trend; Westword has covered the collective’s history and retrospectives repeatedly over the years, and awarded it the Best Long-Running Immersive Experience.
• In 2017, the Museum of Outdoor Arts (MOA) mounted a full retrospective, Lumonics Then & Now, with Westword‘s Michael Paglia describing the internally lit sculptures and projected video as transforming the museum’s galleries into an immersive, softly glowing world of their own.
• Lumonics mounted the opening exhibit in The Galleri at Meow Wolf Denver’s Convergence Station, a permanent showcase dedicated to Colorado artists; Mel Tanner’s Postscript remains part of Meow Wolf’s permanent collection.
• The collective’s work has also been presented at Denver International Airport, Denver Union Station, and other Denver-area institutions including the Lakewood Cultural Center and VERTIGO Art Space.
• Dorothy Tanner received the Denver Mayor’s Award for Innovation in the Arts at age 95, two years before her passing.
• Marc Billard’s video and projection work has continued the collective’s practice into new venues and formats, including Night Lights Denver (projected on the historic Daniels & Fisher Tower), ULTRA Music Festival ,the Supernova Digital Animation Festival, and the Digerati Experimental Media Festival (Marc’s short film, Mountain Meditation 2 will be played on the new LED screen at the 16^th Street Mall from September 1^st to Nov 30^th, 2026, and  was also selected for the 2026 DocuWest Documentary Film Festival.
• The group’s work and history have also been documented in the book Lumonics: The Light Art of Dorothy & Mel Tanner, and on television including PBS.

Today: The Lumonics Legacy Project

The passing of Dorothy Tanner in 2020 and of Barbara Billard in 2023 reduced Lumonics from seven to two: Marc Billard and Barry Raphael, both of whom have been part of the collective since 1972 and now lead the Lumonics Legacy Project together — Raphael as co-archivist and administrator of the School of Light Art, Billard driving the collective’s creative and video production work. Rather than let the collection disperse, they are working to stabilize, preserve, and continue sharing the 200-plus sculptures and the archive that document over 55 years of light-art history. The goal is to keep the work intact and accessible: completing the LED conversion of the remaining sculptures, securing a permanent home with performance space, and ultimately building a traveling exhibition so Lumonics can be shared with audiences well beyond Denver.

Lumonics is not a recent entrant to the light-and-immersive-art conversation but one of its originators — a living, working collective, grounded in formal artistic training and now the subject of scholarly study (it is included in the curriculum at The Sorbonne), whose founders were building sculptural light environments before the term “immersive art” existed, and whose current stewards are actively creating new work, teaching, and exhibiting today as they chart the course of Lumonics into the future.