While many in the art industry were jetting to Miami for the busy fair week earlier this month, the artist Liz Nielsen was on the highway in her 2022 Ford Transit van somewhere between her home and studio in upstate New York and Florida.
The artist is known for her dynamic photograms and is represented by Soco Gallery and Miles McEnery, and also shows with Danziger Gallery, Hexton Gallery and London’s Black Box Project. But for most of Miami Art Week, Nielsen was wearing her art mover hat. She was contracted by Soco and the New York galleries Geary Contemporary, Morgan Lehman Gallery and Marisa Newman Projects to transport art for their stands at various fairs.
“I am in good place with my art career, but the industry is always a rollercoaster for most artists,” Nielsen says. She showed a new work, Stormy Stone Stack (2024), on Danziger’s stand at Untitled, and says her side job affords her a form of “stability” and a less tight budget to enjoy what the week has to offer: “I don’t feel as bad to spend $20 on a vodka soda and I can have face time with my dealers and collectors.”
Liz Nielsen's Stormy Stone Arch (2024) was featured on Danziger Gallery's stand at Untitled Art in Miami Beach Courtesy Liz Nielsen
This was Nielsen’s third year in Miami behind the wheel of her art-filled van, which she calls “Genie”. The artist’s longest route, however, was a five-day drive from New York to Palm Springs to attend the Intersect fair with Elijah Wheat Showroom, the Newburgh, New York-based gallery she runs with her life partner Carolina Wheat.
Nielsen added art transportation to her skill set as an organic outcome of her background in art-handling. A stint with David Zwirner’s art-handling team nearly a decade ago provided her an understanding of inventory-keeping and the physicality of works in different materials. “I always say I graduated from the David Zwirner University,” she says.
The artist, who calls her analogue photography technique “light-painting”, started out by transporting her own work, which has gradually grown in scale. “Galleries have many times asked if I would be willing to move my work and mount it,” she says. As a gallery owner, she also often finds herself carrying Elijah Wheat Showroom artists’ works between states. “I already have a van, so I realised I shouldn’t wait any longer.”
Ghost of a Dream, coming down is the hardest thing, 2023 Courtesy the artist and Geary, New York
The network of galleries Nielsen works with stems from her own industry connections. Nielsen and Wheat, for example, curated a group show titled When the Spirit Moves You for Geary’s Hudson Valley space earlier this year. So Nielsen was the obvious choice when the gallery owner Dolly Geary needed to haul the artist collective Ghost of a Dream’s composite digital images on aluminium to Untitled—where they won this year’s 21c Museum Hotels Acquisition Prize.
“She is familiar with Ghost of a Dream’s work and we trust her completely,” says Geary, who previously worked with more conventional logistics services. The dealer says she prefers the “flexibility” of a smaller business: “Liz was particularly flexible with our schedule and easy to communicate with, and she was able to pick up the work at a late date, which gave us more time to get ready.”
Soco’s managing director Hilary Burt tasked Nielsen with bringing Lauren Luloff’s dyed silk paintings to Miami for similar reasons. “She is our first choice for shipping, and we book her whenever possible,” says Burt, who also works with more conventional art shippers if needed. “But when we can, we prefer to support smaller companies, especially if they are women-owned.”
Nielsen was on the road back up north two days after Miami Art Week wrapped. After dropping off a sold work at a collector’s house in Delray Beach, Florida, she drove to Charlotte, North Carolina, where Soco is located. From there it was nearly 14 hours to New York. Following a few drop-offs in upstate New York, she was all done around one week after she first hit the road.
Liz Nielsen's van, which she nicknamed Genie, on the road between upstate New York and Miami Beach Courtesy Liz Nielsen
She usually passes the long stretches of highway driving by listening to audiobooks of thrillers and cliffhangers, or uplifting jams by Stevie Nicks and Billie Eilish. “I do push-ups to get my blood going,” she says. Her tactics for keeping the art safe include avoiding stays at hotels in the centre of urban areas, parking with the van’s door facing a wall and ideally underneath a light source and a camera, and booking rooms that have a view of the parking lot.
Nielsen enjoys the flexibility of being able to determine her art moving itinerary and prioritise her studio practice when she needs to. Right now, for since, she is staying put until she opens her solo show with Miles McEnery in March.
“At this point in my career, I have a studio assistant as well as a day job,” Nielsen says, but she is confident she will soon be at a “place where I don’t have to drive the van”. She adds: “I believe that all artists are in different positions and it is about maintaining a balance between their art and what else they do to make a living.”