Hotel Art /
hotelart.us

Hotel Art was founded in New York by Ian Swanson, Loney Abrams, and Jonathan Stanish as a nomadic exhibition platform divided between physical installation and online circulation. Developed in December 2012, the project responded to the cost and fixed location of a conventional gallery by using hotel rooms and other short-term rental sites as temporary exhibition spaces.

Each exhibition was installed long enough to be photographed, then dismantled before an audience arrived. Its documentation circulated through hotelart.us and was projected at a separate one-night reception in an art space. The exhibition therefore existed across several locations and forms: the temporary installation, the photographic record, the website, and the social event organized around the images.

For Swanson, this model extended an existing commitment to artist-organized contexts while treating documentation and reception as active parts of the work. Hotel Art did not argue that online viewing replaced physical experience; it made the movement between object, image, venue, and audience visible as the exhibition’s central structure.