A nomadic exhibition can be quickly and easily broken down, packed up, and relocated to its next location, like a trunk show. The items fit into a few containers and travel inconspicuously. Display standards and supports do not accompany the work; these items are selected after the next site has been determined and the work has arrived. The thesis does not change with the location, but the appearance of the show is constantly in flux depending on the hosting site. The artworks are susceptible to wear and tear, but quite often they are reproducible if damage does occur. Generally their object value is not the same as that of works in a museum. Often they are ephemeral or digital, made from or recorded on inexpensive media.

Self-Storage qualified as a nomadic exhibition. It has not yet traveled, but it has the potential to do so, either to another storage unit or to a completely different space. The original 30 participants and their exhibited works would not necessarily need to remain the same. Like such recent exhibitions as Thierry Geoffroy’s Emergency Room (begun in 2006) or Jens Hoffmann’s ongoing Passengers show (begun in 2007), Self-Storage could in fact leave itself open to contributions from a constantly rotating group of participants.

We decided to use a self-storage unit as our exhibition site due to scarcity of funds and lack of access to a space on campus. Additionally, and perhaps more importantly, we did not want to subscribe to the identity or reputation of an existing, permanent space. Metro Self-Storage was an unassuming location, and a nearly perfect site for a nomadic approach to curatorial practice. Rotting food and soiled boxes often lined the street outside. Our unit, number 469, was on the second floor of the building, which in previous decades had been a garment factory and still retained much of its original charm. The floors, made from well-trodden, dusty wood, creaked when walked upon. The sounds of footsteps and rolling handcarts made a lulling soundtrack to our afternoons there. The storage units varied in size and were walled with shiny, blue-and-white corrugated metal. A garage-style roll up door guarded the possessions—or vacant space—inside each one.

Before our “office” hours each day, the hallway in front of unit 469 appeared like all the other corridors. At noon, the door was rolled up to reveal 30 banker’s boxes, 30 interoffice envelopes, two shelves, a desk, a metal index box, four folding tables, some eight folding chairs, a clock, a plant, a desk calendar, a pencil sharpener, a stack of blank notebook paper, exhibition announcements, pencils publicizing the exhibition, and a stamp and stamp pad. The corridor was transformed into the reading room of a functioning library. Nearby tenants would walk by, curious about this unusual occupation of the space. Two “librarians,” usually two of the exhibition’s curators, staffed the desk, looking back at visitors and passersby.

It took roughly one day to build the exhibition environment. The shelves were assembled in less than half an hour. The desk belonged to one of the curators and was brought in from her personal storage unit elsewhere. The folding tables and chairs were taken from classrooms at CCA and positioned with ease. Portable track lights were hung from the unit’s chicken-wire ceiling. Items such as the plant, the interoffice envelopes (which functioned as checkout cards for the bankers’ boxes), and the metal box holding the exhibition’s indexing system were added after the larger pieces of furniture were in place.

Selecting the participating artists and archivists took several months, but the process of assembling and cataloging their work took just a short time. Usual museum and gallery procedures such as installing wall texts, building elaborate display standards, and demarcating the space with paint were not an issue. Deinstallation was similarly uncomplicated and expeditious. The boxes were either sent back to the participating artists or moved to CCA’s San Francisco campus for storage. The shelves were dismantled and abandoned, somewhat illegally, on the street outside. The desk was donated to Goodwill, and the folding tables and chairs were returned to the classrooms from whence they had come. Unit 469 was left as vacant as it had been upon move-in. The next tenants might never know that it had been an exhibition venue.

Nomadic exhibition making involves not only the manner in which the work is displayed, but also the process of commissioning and gathering the work. The artists and archivists in Self-Storage were asked to respond to the architecture of the banker’s box in which their contributed items would be held. Some created new works; others treated the boxes as repositories for one or more older pieces. Lisa Oppenheim, whose work challenges and integrates optics and lens-related media, converted her banker’s box into a pinhole camera, and patrons who checked it out were instructed to make their own pictures. Frances Trombly contributed several pieces of cloth cleverly woven to resemble sheets of notebook paper; all of them were “blank” except the first, onto which she had sewn the words, “I have nothing to say.” Dexter Sinister used their cardboard box as a repository for ephemeral artifacts related to the work they showed at the 2008 Whitney Biennial.

The nomadic exhibition is often a product of an independent curator or artist working without a permanent exhibition site or on a limited budget. Evelyne Jouanno’s Emergency Biennale typifies this approach. When Jouanno was denied an exhibition place in the 2005 Moscow Biennale, she immediately began to think of ways she could still put on a show but was faced with two critical obstacles: lack of funding and lack of space. She ended up asking a list of artists to donate two copies of a work they would like to exhibit. One copy would go to Chechnya in a suitcase, and the second would go to an art space elsewhere. Jouanno intended her project not only to draw attention to Chechnya’s war-torn plight, but also to question the proliferation of international biennials—both in the context of what she called “ambivalent globalization.” An anonymous Chechen national agreed to transport the suitcase across the border and arrange for the exhibition of the artworks on the streets of Grozny, the capital city. To date, three suitcases have made the trip. The parallel show is still traveling and has been exhibited in Paris; Brussels; Bolzano, Italy; Milan; Riga, Latvia; Talinn, Estonia; Vancouver; Puebla, Mexico; Istanbul; San Francisco; and Bialystok, Poland. Jouanno asks each participating artist to recommend another individual whose work would be an appropriate addition to the show. These others are eventually included, and the show grows with each exhibition. The aesthetics of the various presentations are shaped by the hosting sites and are never the same twice.

In a traditional traveling exhibition, the curator reserves the exclusive right to select the work. The work that appears in a nomadic exhibition, however, is often what the artists choose to submit, and the role of the curator is more to provide them with a conceptual framework around which they can shape their contributions. This flexible structure opens up new possibilities for both artistic and curatorial production. The exhibition site has the potential to influence both: It becomes part of the curator’s artistic medium, and it also presents new meanings and possibilities for artists. Self-Storage offered its participants an opportunity to make work under a rubric that did not necessarily factor into their usual artistic practice. Amy Robinson commented later that the exercise of responding to the architecture of a box inspired new directions in her work.

The cultural anthropologist Sharon Bohn Gmelch describes the itinerant artisan, trader, or entertainer as an individual who successfully competes with dominant, established businesses by taking advantage of minimal overhead, wage free household labor, lack of interest in material accumulation and capital expansion, willingness to accept a narrow profit margin from multiple sources, and ability to focus on a narrowly defined market.* Does Gmelch’s definition imply that the independent curator is a sort of gypsy? Certainly not, but the two groups do have in common certain freedoms. Independent curators can conceive of shows that offer compelling curatorial concepts, even when working with limited resources. They are able to mobilize a show, and potentially move it to other exhibition locations, without the restrictions of a conventional institution. Itinerant curatorial models not only offer new possibilities for artists and curators, but they also provide a new context in which visitors can be engaged.

* Gmelch, Sharon Bohn. “Groups That Don’t Want in: Gypsies and Other Artisan, Trader, and Entertainer Minorities.” Annual Review of Anthropology 15, no. 307 (October 1986).

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