How Travieso’s mischief became Trashroom gallery
Words by Amanda Rosa
Alfredo Travieso with Gonzalo Marquez’s Trashroom exhibit.
Photo by Felix Carpio.
Artists from around the world are clamoring to show their work in what is perhaps Miami’s most exclusive gallery space.
It’s a small, white cube layout with decent lighting. No windows. No splashy opening night parties. Barely any sales, though 100% of the profit goes to the artist; the pieces can be purchased by sending a simple DM. Each solo exhibition is on view for about two hours, and the “privileged few” who get to see it in person are only really there to throw out their trash.
This is Miami-based artist Alfredo Travieso’s Trashroom Gallery. The name is not a joke. It’s literally a trash room in his apartment building somewhere in North Miami. For the last year, whenever Travieso’s neighbors run the menial errand of taking out the trash, they never know what to expect when they open the door at the end of the hallway. Usually, it’s an empty room with a trash chute. Sometimes, it is Trashroom, a completely transformed space exhibiting paintings, drawings, sculpture, and video art. Either way, the landlord still doesn’t know about it. “The art world is struggling in many ways,” Travieso says while sitting at his residency space at nonprofit Dimension Variable. “So I think it talks a lot about what the value of our works are, and what their destination is.”
Travieso has shown 23 pop-up art exhibitions. Artists mail him the work, which he installs himself. After about two hours, he takes everything down and posts the exhibition on Instagram, the only place where the rest of the world can experience Trashroom. His neighbors, especially the kids, love it. So does he. Displaying artwork in a space meant for discarding refuse plays into Travieso’s artistic practice, especially lately. Travieso traded in his previous maximalist style for a minimalist approach to sculpture that uses easily accessible materials. That means cardboard boxes, wood, concrete, tin cans, and men’s underwear are transformed into “visual poetry” that speaks to capitalism, consumption, privilege, and gender.
Still, Travieso had his own qualms about his art, or rather, the lack of eyes on it. He was creating art in his small studio apartment, isolated from other artists and viewers. “There wasn’t really a discourse about my work,” he says. That changed when he walked into his building’s trash room and found a white space with perfect lighting. He curated some of his unsatisfactory pieces, put them up on the walls of the trash room, and called it “BEHIND THE GREEN DOOR, A Selection of Uncompelling Works.” In the photos posted on the gallery’s Instagram, a man lugging a full trash bag pensively looks at the artwork. Andrew Treague Prieto, the second artist to show at Trashroom, described it as a “Kubrickian foray into the psychological horror of artistic failure.” Travieso has only sold one work. He has left one work to be discarded, which was the artist’s intention. It was an intact cube of compressed toilet paper sheets by Patrick Carlin Mohundro. “Which was very bold of the artist to do,” Travieso said. “It was a sacrifice.”
Travieso didn’t intend to start a full-blown project, but Trashroom has become a fitting extension of his art practice. “If my work makes me chuckle, I believe I’ve succeeded,” he says.
Finally, an art space with a real sense of humor.