Upcoming Exhibition: The Box Project

Join us on Saturday, November 9th in our Durón Gallery from 5-8 PM for the opening reception The Box Project Exhibition. The Box Project features the work of three women’s collectives located in Paris, Mexico City, and L.A., who began exchanging small artworks with each other. In the vein of Mail Art of the 1960s and women’s art collectives of the 1970s, The Box Project presents the story of three all-female groups in three distant cities coming together to support each other. The first of these collectives originated in Paris with a gathering of expatriate artists who shared ideas and experiences and began to generate artistic projects together. The gathering grew, and in 2018, visitors from Mexico City and Los Angeles were inspired to create similar groups in their cities, beginning a transatlantic conversation.  These groups of women call themselves ‘salons’ in reference to the spaces for informal cultural and intellectual interaction that flourished in 17th century France.
In order to welcome and celebrate these new groups, the women in the Paris Salon decided that each member would create a small matchbox artwork that represented herself, to send to Mexico City and Los Angeles. The salons in these two cities responded by creating and sending boxes representing their own members, and the dialogue between the collectives that is now The Box Project was born. Initially, there was no expectation that any of these exchanges and objects would be publicly displayed. However, after hearing about The Box Project, SPARC Co-Founder and Artistic Director Judy Baca offered to host the project at SPARC’s Durón Gallery. The exhibition features over seventy of these small, precious, and personal objects of creative exchange. The exhibition will be on view until January 18th, 2020.

Download the press release.