PAY WHAT YOU WANT
Judy Giera, Jada Hairston, juliana roccoforte novello, Charlie Perez-Tlatenchi, Zakariya Abdul-Qadir, Iain Emaline, Charlotte Zinsser, Woojae Kim, Noah Dillon, Ivoire Foreman, Bucarito, Max Vélez, and ED/MCL
January 11th - February 9th, 2025
Opening Reception | Saturday, January 11th | 6-8PM
All the works in this show can be purchased at any price you’d like to pay, starting at $1. The artists, however, have been prompted to make their pieces difficult to sell. But you can still have it if you want.
Most contemporary art is an expression of capital flow. The dominance of zombie painting in blue chip galleries - abstract or figurative doesn’t matter - is the best example: paintings make great furniture, and they’re flat just like an Instagram post. Even better, they’re easily stored and ready for resale when the time is right.
Sculpture, at its most funded, becomes property development spectacle, plopped where the rent is high enough - or an airport. The world’s famous cities all hire the same famous artists to drop steel shapes in their most mediagenic plazas. New terminals come with the freshest KAWS, for no clear contextual reason other than to announce that their city is engaging with finance on high. Sculpture as diplomat.
Down below, workers on our phones, buying anything nowadays is adversarial. Online shopping is a fog of endless options, subscriptions scam you, physical retail is somehow also just online shopping. And of course, buying art has barriers that renders us unable.
Blue Chip Galleries often don’t like to talk about money. They hide their prices and hope the discourse doesn’t mention it. But an exorbitantly high price of an artwork is its most political aspect, and its central subject.
haul gallery is run by two artists with day jobs. Because we’re not rich, money is a central force in our lives. For this reason, we made haul reflect our reality, and the reality of working artists. We are transparent about money, with everyone, because working artists must be transparent about theirs. In this way, money is also the central subject of haul, and the central subject of this show. Rarely are regular gallery viewers given the power to affect the price of an artwork.
This show also launches haul as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. After 5 years as a “for profit” gallery (without much profit), we intend to lean even further into a focus on showing work that is not commercially driven, and working with artists in a way that prioritizes them instead of invisible ultra-rich collectors.
