Ever been hanging out at your regular food truck rally and think to yourself, “You know what would go great with this goat and poblano enchilada? Some delicate, thought-provoking mixed-media abstracts and a severed concrete slab or two.”
Well wait no more! Art is no longer confined to the outside of vans. It’s got a seat inside in a growing fleet of mobile art galleries.
From the New York Times:
While statistics on mobile galleries are hard to come by, social media shows the trend catching on in Los Angeles; Seattle; Santa Fe, N.M.; Tampa Bay, Fla.; Chicago; and even Alberta, where a ’60s teardrop-red trailer presents works from a changing lineup of local artists. Pinterest boards show a range of designs on pages dedicated to mobile galleries, and Twitter is full of people advertising their whereabouts with hashtags such as #keeptrucking. Ann Fensterstock, a lecturer on contemporary art and the author of “Art on the Block,” a history of New York art galleries, said these galleries are “part of the zeitgeist of this moment in art creating.”
Seriously, the mobile art gallery is an amazing development. The low cost of operating a truck, just $395 a month, according to Elise Graham, curator/driver of a New York based Rodi Gallery truck, means owners can take chances on unknown artists and, perhaps more importantly, art can pop up anywhere.
Plus, as we all know, the first wave of gentrification is the hipster restaurant followed quickly by the art gallery. Now, instead of displacing vibrant communities, we can gentrify mall parking lots and the local Chili’s. Heck, we can even gentrify previously gentrified areas, a double, regentrification, reminiscent of a snake eating its own tail while wearing skinny jeans and riding a fixie.
And with climate change threatening so much of our world culture, it’s nice to know the Mona Lisa’s got a getaway car.
