This U-Haul Is a Gallery
And a meta statement on how hypercommodification of space impacted the creative scene in one of the most expensive real estate markets in the US
One of my favorite places on the internet is Keith McNally’s Instagram where the famous New York restauranteur and the owner of iconic city institutions, like Balthazar and Minetta Tavern, posts dinner service reports from his staff, anecdotes from back in the day about Anna Wintour and Ingrid Bergman, and occasional billionaire snark. It’s so cliche, it’s borderline embarrassing — on par with saying my favorite writer is Joan Didion (she isn’t) and my favorite artist is Andy Warhol (not anymore).
My only consolation is that there is a reason why all these years later, young people en masse still idolize these larger-than-life characters — they represent what feels like a now mostly gone ‘everything-is-possible’ era of the city where a talented artist could exchange their work for a room at the Chelsea Hotel, and a former waitress and restaurant manager could scrape together enough money to sign a 15-year lease downtown and open their own place.
What’s not lost on my generation is the power of blind enthusiasm that gets you to close your eyes and follow your most delusional dreams anyway — despite the housing crisis, the quiet recession, and some sort of geopolitical crisis always looming in the background. James Sundquist, the founder of Uhaul Gallery is an excellent example of that.
Technically, Uhaul Gallery is exactly what it sounds like — a mobile art gallery set up in the back of a standard U-Haul truck. But on a conceptual level, it’s also a meta statement on the hypercommodification of space in the city where every squire foot is accounted for despite plenty of storefronts and office spaces remaining vacant as landlords hold out for affluent tenants — a bummer for artists, creatives, and small business hustlers who make the city special.
The original idea for Uhaul Galley came to James around 2016-2017 when he thought about driving a truck full of his paintings to New York from Rhode Island, where he grew up, on a Thursday night to coincide with art show openings in Chelsea, but it wasn’t until last spring when he finally got the guts to go through with it. “I was becoming increasingly frustrated with the cost of space and battling that in order to have a place to paint and make art. I was running myself ragged trying to balance work with personal life with my own studio practice,” he explained. “During one studio move, I remember putting the first painting in the back of a U-Haul and having a moment of recognition of that earlier idea. I saw 3 walls and a roof — a gallery. The next night I went to an opening at a Chinatown gallery and I realized the space I was standing in was effectively the same size as a U-Haul…I estimated they were paying many thousands of dollars a month to hold that amount of space. The Uhaul is 19.99/day. Better yet, it could be anywhere. Even in the most expensive real estate markets in the city, I'd be paying the same price to have a gallery.”
“A US dime has an area of 0.391 sq. In.
The average price of 1 sq. Ft. of retail space in Manhattan is $638 per year.
The floor space occupied by one dime in New York City costs $1.78 per year.”
The inaugural Uhaul Gallery show took place in SoHo — a neighborhood that went through a classic case of gentrification. “It felt appropriate to reclaim that space,” James told me. Titled Delivery Included, it featured works from Titus McBeath and Luc Hammond-Thomas among other artists and was a real team effort to put together — fellow artists Fili Latinikas, Buzz Smith, as well as James’ partner Briana Van Verdeghem all came together to make it happen.
Since then, they’ve hosted five more shows in New York and most recently, one in LA, parking right outside of prominent galleries and international art fairs. Each one was powered by friendly mischief and hustle, as well as parking tickets and hit-and-run collateral framed and sold as art pieces along the way. My favorite is the one titled Stolen Goods. Put together in collaboration with Victoria Gill and Jack Chase, it featured crowdsourced objects people have stolen from work — everything from a box full of cheap black hair combs to the original Pink Panther animation cel stolen from Framestore in London. Jack’s contribution was the Boards of Canada record Music Has the Right to Children (1998) that he stole on his last day at Eavesdrop bar in Brooklyn, titled I Was The Only One Who Would Play This Record Anyway.
Just around the time I decide to profile Uhaul Gallery,
happened to write a piece on the blurring lines between “journey” and “destination” in the most literal sense — transport that substitutes real estate as economic inequality in cities in the US and across the world intensifies. “As urban real estate grows more expensive, activities that might otherwise take place in buildings spill onto the street,” he explained. “The food truck—as much a symbol of the millennial generation as not being able to buy a home—exemplifies this: Food trucks proliferated in gentrified American urban areas not because they needed mobility but because streets and parking lots are more economical sites than the equivalent building space in many locations.”The same easy money that funded the millennial lifestyle subsidy also inflated asset prices as the 2010s progressed, meanwhile, intensifying the contrast between frivolous luxuries that were artificially cheap and basic needs like housing that were getting more expensive — hinting at a condition that Bruce Sterling calls favela chic, in which “you have lost everything material but you’re still wired to the gills.” -
in “In Praise of Slow Motion”To some degree, these mobile establishments are a painful physical representation of the gloomy and confusing American reality that many of us try not to acknowledge for the sake of preserving our own sanity. If you give it too much thought, you eventually start wondering — is a food truck a powerful act of rejecting the system or its unwitting accomplice? Are we sticking it to the man by finding loopholes in his rules or are we merely encouraging his behavior by refusing to engage with them all together?
Objectively though, transport is not that different from buildings, especially as our lives become more digital. “If the plane has wi-fi, it’s just another room — maybe a bit more cramped than the one where you’d be working or watching TV at home, but good enough for a few hours,” Drew argued in his piece. Plus, the stakes are high — by physically displacing artists, creatives, and hustlers from the neighborhoods they inhabited, the rapid growth of the tech sector and the financial inequality it created also disrupted global art and culture in a negative way. “its kinda fucked up theres no exiled intellectual cities anymore. its just expensive everywhere now,” @clockstiqqun wrote in a viral tweet. “theres nowhere to be a weird little fuckup with your weird little fuckup friends and thats why literature is dead.” In this context, a gallery inside a U-Haul could be a catalyst for a radical effort to bring back the magic of the city that people like Keith McNally, write Instagram captions and memoirs about.
Uhaul Gallery’s biggest undertaking to date is organizing the Uhaul Art Fair that is set to take place across ten U-Haul trucks parked in Chelsea in September. If you are an artist looking to have your work featured or a curator looking to get involved in putting the fair together, fill out an application here. In the meantime, you can catch Uhaul Gallery’s next show Today, Last Year — the gallery’s first solo exhibit starring Ben Nunez — in Chelsea from May 8th to May 11th. “The show is a presentation of Ben's "Panopticon" piece from 2024 in which he wore a police body camera everyday of his waking life that year,” James told me. “As the show title implies, we will be screening the film from May 8th-11th of last year. People will be able to buy a day of Ben's life on a USB stick.” Follow them on Instagram to get the location info closer to that weekend, as well as the details for three more shows they will host overt the summer.
IN THE MARGINS:
Busy Corner now has a Newsboard that will populate with new content over the week. This week’s curation features my chat with Ellie Chen and Jensen Neff about the community they’ve built around their LA-based clothing brand Oddli for Inc. Your favorite artists, creatives, and influencers are all over their Instagram comments gushing about Oddli’s new collections and growth milestones (without being on the brand’s payroll!), and two minutes into talking to Ellie and Jens, I understood why.
In case you missed last week’s newsletter, I got to speak with three impromptu Puma researchers and archivists about Puma’s stupidly cool 2000s archives as well as the brand’s latest comeback attempts:
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