U-Haul Gallery counter-steers, one storage truck at a time
Ah, U-haul. The eponymous American company for all your storage and moving needs, all in the back of a truck.
In New York City, gallery founder James Sundquist and curator Jack Chase have taken that idea and flipped it: what if the pristine “white cube” gallery wasn’t a cube at all, but the back of a U-Haul?
Together, they’ve transformed the truck into a moving art space, challenging the city’s rent-heavy art scene and rethinking how art can travel.
From storage to showcase
It all started in the spring of May 2024. But it was back in 2018 when Sundquist, an artist himself, considered the idea, as he debated bringing a truck full of paintings to New York from Rhode Island to reach the exhibit openings happening the same night in Chelsea.
In an interview with ARTnews, Chase expounds, “U-Haul Gallery was borne out of a frustration with the financial constraints of showing work in New York City.”
Instead of paying thousands in rent and broker fees, the duo spends around $20 a day on truck rentals plus gas, mileage, and the occasional parking ticket. Ironically, the back of the truck is about the same size as many of the New York galleries that pay exorbitant monthly leases.
Chase described it as “inclusive” and “accessible,” reaching more people as they exhibit in areas around the city, from sporting events to public parks. Wherever U-Haul Gallery is, its roll-up door is wide open.
Culture with a roll-up door
U-Haul Gallery’s approach seems to reflect what French curator Nicolas Bourriaud called “relational aesthetics,” when art goes beyond objects to create social encounters. By rolling into public spaces, the U-Haul turns art into a chance meeting, making the public’s passersby part of the work itself.
For all its looseness, the gallery is still carefully thought-out. The art is not without security, as the interior of the truck utilizes traditional white gallery walls and wooden rails that protect the hanging works, while on top of the truck is the gallery’s unmistakable logo.
The first-ever show took place in SoHo and was titled “Delivery Included” with works from Mads Davis, Mary Sellers, Titus McBeath, and Luc Hammond-Thomas, among other artists. They have since traveled beyond New York to LA, parking outside established galleries and international art fairs.
Earlier this September, from Sept. 5 to 7, U-Haul Gallery parked right near The Armory Show, one of the most prestigious contemporary and modern art fairs in the world, for their very own U-Haul Art Fair. For this edition of the guerrilla art fair, their ten-gallery lineup was impressive, including internationally acclaimed exhibitors like Nino Mier Gallery and Aspen’s Hexton Gallery.
Coming up later in the month, from Sept. 18 to 22, U-Haul Gallery is set to present “Paulina Freifeld: Luciérnaga,” an exhibit showcasing Freifeld’s photographic archive of her family and the “Familia G” Mexican banknote series. The project shows “Mexican flora and fauna, on the verge of destruction in service to the note they are printed on,” as noted on the U-Haul gallery Instagram. It’s set to be exhibited on Wall Street.
Driving against the system
There’s a sense of fun and rebellion in U-Haul Gallery’s approach: going against the system by using a legal loophole, while engaging more intimately with people. Slashing pretensions, they make an institutional critique, challenging the very structures that define what is and isn’t art. Through its format, U-Haul Gallery doesn’t simply display the work, but makes statements against the economic and social barriers of traditional gallery models established in the art world.
The organizers often keep the location of the U-Haul Gallery a secret, stirring up a sense of mischief as they pop up uninvited at blue-chip fairs. They are sometimes celebrated and sometimes been told to leave, like at fairs in New York and LA, including Frieze.
Aligning with the rebellious, anti-establishment ethos of guerrilla art (a broader term for art created in a public space without official approval), U-Haul Gallery subverts the system from the literal outside, asserting that art doesn’t need permission to exist.
More than a workaround to New York’s rent crisis, U-Haul Gallery is a statement on who gets to access art and who gets to define it. And by putting culture on wheels, they’ve parked the galleries right on the street, for everybody.
