Artist-Curators (Art Enthusiasts)

The simpler the image, the vaster the dream. - Gaston Bachelard

The Other White Cube Project revolves around a simple metaphor, that refrigerator displays resemble museum walls. I conceived the project in response to Brian O’Doherty’s Inside the White Cube (1976). In his book, O’Doherty argued that context has been a missing variable in the interpretation of art. In other words, where and how something is shown is just as important as what is shown. Anything can be a work of art when displayed in an artful way, a phenomenon art historian Svetlana Alpers has called the “museum effect.” For O’Doherty, context has a story of its own, one that runs alongside the stylistic developments in art. In a revolutionary approach, he traced the history of art through changes in display techniques – the (dis)use of frames, drapery, lighting, period rooms, and other display strategies.. 

O’Doherty observed that, over time, art museums and galleries eliminated decorative features in favor of white, streamlined space, referred to as the “white cube.” A quintessential feature of modern and contemporary art, white cubes have white walls, fluorescent lighting, and linoleum flooring. White cubes are completely sterile spaces with no windows and no reminders of life outside the walls. To modernists, white cube galleries represented purity, but to O’Doherty, it symbolized the ultimate separation of life and art. Although modernism and the twentieth-century have passed, white cube gallery space remains as the most common context for displaying art. 

The Other White Cube Project has applied O’Doherty’s white cube theory to another, more literal white cube – the refrigerator. By transferring art and museum theory to the refrigerator, the Other White Cube Project offers participants the opportunity to become curators – to select, organize, and arrange objects into a display. In doing so, the project empowers participants with a greater understanding of context, which will likely enhance their next visit to an art museum or gallery. Also, by taking the white cube out of the art world and into every kitchen, the Other White Cube Project popularizes the white cube and interrupts its separation of art and life.

Become an Other White Cube curator, submit photographs, and join the museum conversation.