For New Yorkers, it has become a familiar sight to see an open U-Haul moving truck parked on the street outside buzzy gallery openings with its own art show tucked inside. Unaffiliated with the ubiquitous truck rental company, U-Haul Gallery was founded in 2024 by James Sundquist as a response to New York’s steep real estate prices. Jack Chase later joined and, most recently, Lilia Muscarella, but for such a small operation the trio behind the nomadic gallery does some heavy lifting.
Last year, they staged the first edition of the irreverent U-Haul Art Fair, in which traditional galleries and artists’ collectives displayed and sold work out of ten moving trucks parked along a block of West 22nd Street in Chelsea. This year, the number of participants has doubled, with 20 exhibitors accepted out of more than 200 applications.
“The art fair circuit has become a near parody of itself with increasingly haughty and stifling atmospheres,” Sundquist tells The Art Newspaper. “Dealers love the opportunity to loosen their collars and access a crowd that they would not typically engage with at a standard art fair.”
At $4,000 for a “stand”, the cost of showing at U-Haul Art Fair is far lower than most other New York fairs, but the novelty of the format and charming DIY attitude have attracted some serious dealers. This year’s lineup includes Southern Guild, Palo Gallery, Hexton Gallery and Post-Times, as well as the anonymous team behind DivaCorp, the Los Angeles-based art criticism collective.
In its own stand in a van, U-Haul Gallery will stage a group show titled Breakfast, featuring work from the community fostered at weekly artists' breakfasts at FOOD, the restaurant revived by the late artist Lucien Smith. Part of the proceeds will go to Smith's non-profit Serving the People, which supports and connects young artists.
The fair offers a tongue-in-cheek response to a very real affordability crisis in cities like New York. The surging cost of living, stagnant wages and a housing shortage have made life in the city for art sector workers more cost prohibitive than for previous generations, to say nothing of studio and gallery space. It is enough for some to call for an exodus from New York. Others have forged scrappy alternatives, like Adam Zhu's Market Gallery on his Chinatown roof, one of a number of apartment galleries popping up over the city.
“The gallery and the fair are two guys’ idea of a different approach to the stale and stifling contemporary arts ecosystem,” Sundquist says. “There’s a lot of talk about how fucked this whole system is, and we think that if you feel strongly about our community, then go out and do something about it. It’s better than moving to Philly.”
- U-Haul Art Fair, 25-27 September, West 22nd Street in Chelsea, New York
