Last year I exhibited at Space 301 in downtown Mobile, Alabama—an 8,000 square foot converted warehouse space that used to house the Mobile Press-Register. I was fortunate enough to be scheduled just when the new director, Bob Sain, was starting. He had only just arrived from California where he had been director of Montalvo Arts Center in Silicon Valley. Prior to that he started up the LACMALab at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
We’ve long been in need of someone like Bob here on the coast where the term “contemporary art” meets more often with a questioning stare than anything else. New Orleans has the CAC, some galleries that I would actually call galleries, universities with art departments that aren’t complete fictions, and on and on. When it comes to art, my stretch of the Gulf Coast has, well, nada. That Mobile would raise the bar like this was and is music to my ears.
Until Bob’s arrival, Space 301 used its renovated and polished main space for all its exhibitions. Few people ever even saw the raw space in the back--the Fabrications Hall—originally home to the Register’s printing presses. It wasn’t included in the renovations and until now, was used mostly for special events, by people who paid other people to come in and transform it.
The grit and magic of this room--invisible to past curators--was very visible to Bob Sain. So he asked me to inaugurate it—a new venue for artists whose work might lose its punch in more pristine settings. And so I did. Ecstatically. I now consider it my yardstick. The space I use to gauge all others. And, yes, good luck measuring up…
