ally reeves. designer. artist. writer. instructor.

Above left: Ally Reeves and Alberto Almarza pose with Almarza's handmade clay pottery and sculptures. Above right: Jenn Gooch's One Cold Hand showed in the winter months and aimed to reconnect lost gloves with their original owners. The museum's intention was to acknowledge the museum/ gallery structure as an extremely helpful tool in learning about the world

The Mobile Museum is notable as Ally Reeves most prominent and efficient effort at creating a portable show space. Manifested in 2006 with the assistance of a Sprout Fund Grant, the Mobile Museum as a fully human-powered bike pulled arts space. The Mobile Museum visited over 20 locations and reached over 2500+ viewers in person, in spaces in the city of Pittsburgh where art was typically unseen.

The museum's intention was to acknowledge the museum/ gallery structure as an extremely helpful tool in learning about the world around us and to tackle the two limitations a typical museum faces: One being the task of luring audiences into these spaces and the second task being that of keeping a collection current and engaging.

Above: "Musei Wormiani Historia",  from the Museum Wormianum depicting Ole Worm's cabinet of curiosities.

The Mobile Museum’s deeper philosophical nature was aimed at exploring the epistemology behind creativity and fact asking audiences “How do we know what we know?” and “ By what means do ideas travel from casual everyday fact into the rigid, dictionary like structure of a standard museum?” In this way the Mobile Museum is similar to Museums of earlier days in which viewers were encouraged to draw their own ideas and about the objects and artifacts at hand, rather than take the museum's interpretations of artifacts as proof or a proposed fact or theory.

“…The pedagogy of the Mobile Museum is chance, wonder and interpretation. Viewers are invited to handle the contents of the museum: something you would never do in a typical gallery or museum. Also the artist’s whose work was shown travel with the museum and engage atypical arts audiences. These audiences have more questions than the average viewer and the artist and curator are present to answer them. “
                                                                                    -Ally Reeves

The Mobile Museum featured two artist exhibitions during it's on the road show time: Alberto Almarza's Pok and Mummies, and Jenn Gooch's online project One Cold Hand project which reached national audiences and was featured on NPR. The Mobile Museum made appearances for a full year spanning 2006-2007 with downtime during bad weather.

Below: A blue line charts the paths the Mobile Museum traveled around the city of Pittsburgh. Of note is the extreme hilly geography of Pittsburgh! The artist was in for a work out...