Current Exhibit: “I Cannot Afford Mel Bochner” (Feb. 2026 – present)
Featured artists: Anatol Knotek, Mel Bochner, Braxton Fuller, Matt Keegan, Mary Elizabeth Phillips, Scott Reeder
Sadly for me, I am not rich. I do not own my own art gallery, or a public museum, or even a single measly vault where I can show off my treasures. Part of why I created this webpage is so I could share my art collection with the world. Even though I know I’m a very small fish in a very big pond, one of the great joys of art should be to share it. Every collector is, to one degree or another, a curator, and it is a shame that so much curation is hidden away from the world.
Some time ago, I found a webpage that allows users to create virtual art exhibits. You can upload pictures, hang them on virtual walls, append explanatory text to them, and visitors can “walk” through your gallery … well, I won’t say “just like the real thing”, but at least a passable approximation. And so while it is unlikely that I will be curating a real-world art exhibit any time soon, I figured I could at least try a digital one.
My first exhibit is titled simply “I Cannot Afford Mel Bochner”. If you’ve browsed my collection, you’ve seen me allude several times to how influential seeing a Bochner exhibit was early in my collecting career, even as it quickly became apparent that nearly all of Bochner’s works (at least, of the sort I’d be interested in) were far outside my price range.
“I Cannot Afford Mel Bochner” thus displays other word artists whose work with language made me smile in the same way Bochner’s does. It also includes the one Bochner work I did seriously attempt to purchase–an aquatint I was the underbidder for at an auction that occurred just a few weeks before he died (another example of the same work went up a few months after he died … and sold for almost ten times the hammer of the one I nearly obtained).
Finally, I’ve also included my own amateur attempt to do a homage to Bochner, a painting that arranges protest slogans from around the world in Bochner’s signature style. Each of these chants were cried as part of a movement to resist authoritarianism. They are in English, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, and Yiddish; the represent movements in the United States, Canada, and Mexico, Europe, Russia, and the Middle East. They are diverse and distinct, but deliberately run together. They are many movements, and also one.
I hardly claim to be an artist anywhere near the caliber of the professionals I’ve displayed here. But as I’ve dipped my toes into creating art alongside collecting it, my mantra has been to remind myself that its okay to be mediocre. I don’t have to be brilliant to create something. I can just create for the joy of it — and I really enjoyed making this painting.
“Cadence”, 48″ h x 36″ w, acrylic on canvas (2025)
David Schraub 