Surveyor
One summer I gutted my garage and turned it into an art gallery. Built gallery walls that can easily handle 500lb loads in shear. Built furniture from OSB with my friend Charlie Vinz from Adaptive Operations, and adopted a bench from the old original Parachute restaurant (we still use that bench in our dining room - shouts to Bev and Johnny <3). Mounted a projector. Hung 1:1 contact prints of shattered windshields from a then-local artist and still good friend Chad Gerth.
Surveyor had a bar, a bicycle valet service, and a neighborhood guy come by on a bike to sell tamales out of a hot box hooked onto his handlebars. Full service, nahmean?
The floor of my garage, like many, is pitted, grey and dusty - so it reminded me of a lunar surface…sooo, follwing that, I called my gallery Surveyor after the first US expeditionary lunar module. Like that module, I think art galleries should perform a basic function: support those who observe the world and, through their art, report back on what they see. That's why all of the Surveyor merch that was given out that night (in anti-static evidence bags) had Surveyor's tag on it: Observe + Report. It was fun seeing those sweatshirts around town the next year.
Surveyor ran one show. Sixty-some people showed up to a garage in a Chicago alley on a Friday night for the hell of it (and to see art. and drink beer. and have someone wash their bike while they ate tamales). It worked. And, like Artemis 2, it will come back around from the dark side of the moon again someday, too.
