São Paulo Curator Creates Drive-Thru Gallery to Show Art During Covid-19

SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL – With art galleries and museums closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic, a São Paulo gallery owner decided to create a unique experience for art lovers: a ‘drive-thru’ art exhibition.

The DriveThru.Art idea was born after gallery owner and curator Luis Maluf saw most of the shops and galleries in his upscale neighborhood closed due to the stay-at-home orders. “It was very distressing seeing all those store windows empty,” Maluf told The Rio Times in a telephone interview.

“I first thought about putting artists’ works in those empty windows but the logistics would be difficult, then I remembered the ARCA, with its enormous space and I thought of a drive thru event,” he said.

According to Maluf, the 8,000 square meter industrial-warehouse-turned-event-venue, located in the western part of the city, was a perfect setting for the venture. Maluf along with ARCA’s owners, Mauricio Soares and Mario Sergio Albuquerque, put the entire project together in a matter of weeks.

According to the curator, the entire project from the idea to the implementation was done in only a few weeks.

“We thought about how to reframe the urban space through art and bring connection and hope. DriveThru.Art is a way of reliving the experience of visiting an exhibition and seeing the works up close,” says Maluf.

“Art has the power to challenge the status quo, rethink and recreate spaces and, observing the pandemic scenario that we are going through, living online experiences all the time, we thought of a solution where the public can visit the show in person, but without exposing themselves to Covid-19,” add Soares and Albuquerque.

Maluf says he chose eighteen artists and asked them to create large panels reflecting causes and issues that have become more pronounced during the pandemic, such as racism, women’s issues, intersexuality and the environment. Most of the works were produced during the quarantine period.

“I gave the artists about ten days to complete their work,” said the curator.

There are works like Carne Viva, by Luiz Escañuela, in which the artist brings to the canvas the Amazon Forest with a texture of human skin. According to the artist, the wounds seen in in the map are the deforestation of the Amazon.

“This exhibition comes at a time when the world needs less virtual imagery and more physical interaction, more real contact with the arts; with the pandemic, this is as close as we can get right now,” Escañuela tells The Rio Times.

There are also paintings, videos and photographs by Brazilian and foreign artists in the contemporary art scene and also artists’ collectives created during the pandemic, like Acidum Project, Apolo Torres, Crânio, Criola, Edu Cardoso, Felipe Morozini, Gian Luca Ewbank, Hanna Lucatelli, Juneco Marcos, Nathalie Edenburg, Patrick Rigon, Raquel Brust, Ruas do Bem, Thasya Barbosa, Vermelho Steam, Vinicius Meio and Vinicius Parisi.

The entire visit takes approximately an hour, with visitors remaining inside their vehicles at all times. “We have twenty cars inside the warehouse at any given time and visitors remain approximately two minutes at each stop,” says Maluf.

Tickets for the exhibition are purchased beforehand and are for a specific day and time. Each vehicle can have a maximum of four people. Those who do not have an automobile can still purchase a ticket and the venue will provide an automobile with a driver for visitors to experience the show.

To know a little more about the paintings, visitors can scan a QR Code from their car window to access an audio which will explain the piece.

Tickets can be obtained through the drivethru.art website. The exhibition is open Wednesday through Sunday, between 1 and 9PM, running until August 9th.

According to Maluf the project has been a huge success, with the Drive-Thru show having being sold out days in advance for most time-slots.

“At this moment in time it is very important to encourage art and culture, to encourage creativity,” concludes Maluf.