From a phoenix on the soil,
a wall of light.
THE WALL didn’t arrive overnight. It was built over fifteen years of community ceremony, illuminated processions, and a stubborn faith that the best of a city is what it celebrates.
The Starflower of Destiny
The sigil we carry into every room.
You’ll see the starflower stamped on featured cards in the Resource Library, on heritage posters at our festivals, and on every gathering we’ve hosted since the early years. It marks organizations the Stars 4 Peace team has personally met — not as a regulatory endorsement, but as a quiet relational vow: we know these people, we’ve broken bread with them, we trust their work.
The flower’s six points are a quiet nod to the years we’ve spent learning, in public, how a community lights itself.
How we got here
A timeline of the work.
A search for ritual.
Tacoma is searching for something to join its fragments. A small group of artists, writers, and educators begins meeting at places like Free Range Kitchen, Northern Pacific Coffee, and Sanford & Son’s Library — looking for the shape of a tradition that belongs to the South Sound itself.
Lumins Festivus is born.
Inspired by Olympia’s Luminary Procession, Adam Martin and a band of friends launch Lumins Festivus — an autumnal festival of light: handmade luminaries, illuminated sculptures, a procession through downtown Tacoma. The first year’s theme: the Stellar Galactic Zü of Life.
“In a free culture, you get the best of what you celebrate. So you celebrate the mind of the people. The Lumins Festivus is an interpretation in light of that mind.”
Years of the Oceanic, Soil, and Airs of the Heavens.
Each subsequent year takes an elemental theme — the Oceanic in 2013, the Soil of Earth in 2014, the Airs of the Heavens in 2015. The procession moves through Wright Park’s W.W. Seymour Botanical Conservatory and spills into Broadway. The phoenix image at the top of this page is from that Soil of Earth year — a reminder of what gets rebuilt when a community decides to gather.
THE WALL — the first installation.
At Gig Harbor, Stars 4 Peace installs the first Wall — a literal public art piece inviting passersby to add their own words of hope. The installation gives a name to a feeling that had been building since 2010: a community is a wall of light, brick by brick.
Music & Heart in Wright Park.
Lumins evolves into Music & Heart in Wright Park (MHWP) — an outdoor concert tradition under the conservatory’s shadow. The annual posters, ordered 2019 → 2025 on the Bands page, trace the festival’s arc: Origins, Lancelot, Lightning Haze, UFO Eruption.
The Lumins Y15 retrospective.
Fifteen years in, the Lumins poster reads like a chronicle of everyone who has ever helped light a Tacoma street. Every name carries forward a promise about how this place wants to behave with itself.
THE WALL goes digital.
Everything we’ve learned about ritual, access, and community economy converges into a web app: lookwashington.com. Bands seed it with music. Artists seed it with art. Local businesses seed it with deals. Donors fund the 501(c)(3)s doing the actual work — and in return they receive the Trove: a growing harvest of everything the community has chosen to share.
This is the Power of Peace to Provide.
The Umbrella
Artists 4 Life in the Sound.
A4S is the organizing umbrella behind THE WALL. It’s the body that has carried Lumins, MHWP, and now this app forward — bands, painters, poets, baristas, librarians, neighbors. A loose constellation of people who took on the same simple work for fifteen years:
“We gather. We celebrate. We look out for one another.”
“None of us wants too much more detritus in the ocean. The premise is simple — if you disturb the reproductivity of a species, you increase its mortality. That species will then die out.”
“In every generation are those able and desiring to foresee a better world, and to direct their efforts toward the realization of something greater for themselves, their loved ones and their broader-reaching community.”
“This city is searching for a ritual to join its fragments.”
