Engaging directly with this shared global experience of pandemic-motivated social distancing, Blum & Poe Broadcasts, Dave Muller, and Three Day Weekend present an online group exhibition titled The Gallery is Closed. A number of artists and members of our community have contributed personal drawings and public signs that announce closure and reflect a multitude of absent voices and voices in waiting. Projected on images of our empty galleries, collective signs of closure offer a portrait of this moment, and the empathy, hopefulness, and resolve of our community.

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Muller writes:

By April 25th Blum & Poe will have been closed for five weeks (about the length of a gallery show). I’ve always been interested in the gallery as a framing device and in exhibitions that call the ‘neutrality’ of the exhibition space into question.

Does the light in the icebox really turn off when the door is closed? 

From what I hear, Sam Scharf, B&P’s Manager of Exhibitions (in LA) has been dropping by weekly, collecting/sorting out the mail and doing whatever it takes to maintain things there. And I ponder… In a way, for the last month the gallery has inadvertently reenacted Robert Barry’s Closed Gallery works of 1969, or Yves Klein’s empty gallery work The Void of 1958. Maybe there’s been a B&P gallery swap like Michael Asher’s Morgan Thomas at Claire Copley Gallery Inc./Claire Copley Gallery Inc. at Morgan Thomas, from 1977. It’s hard to differentiate online, and gallery swaps are now commonplace. A withdrawal from the art world à la Lee Lozano? Maybe B&P has been enacting a light & space performance; a private Robert Irwin or James Turrell. Perhaps that’s where we’ve been for the last month or so.

What to do now?

I’m asking artists and other cultural producers to contribute signs of closure (created or found, or something in between) to be displayed inside and outside a virtual recreation of B&P LA. The virtual doors of B&P LA will ‘open’ on April 25th, then we’ll ‘install’ works on a virtual model of the gallery and show photos of the installation on B&P’s website, along with photos of the individual works. The result will look much like the exhibition sections of the current B&P website.

The exhibition will continue to expand and share new work during the course of its run, and will be on view as long as the galleries in Los Angeles, New York and Tokyo remain closed.

After that, I imagine, The Gallery is Open.

Three Day Weekend is a roving project space operated by Dave Muller. Exhibitions are generally three days long, occurring on holidays and their weekends (there are always exceptions).  While currently based in Los Angeles, Three Day Weekend has organized shows in Houston, New York, Vienna, Tokyo, Malmo, and London. Three Day Weekend was established in early 1994 in downtown Los Angeles.