Imagine a room where 150 windows open into alternate worlds, be they simple, garish, theatrical, or dreamy. This is the feeling one gets walking into Gallery Route One’s 17th Box Show, an annual fundraiser that has grown into a Bay Area institution. Each work of art is created in, on, or out of identical wooden boxes—but the possibilities are endless.
“It has really put the gallery on the map with a lot of people,” said Betty Woolfolk, executive director of the gallery. “It has been wonderful. People come from all over just for the Box Show.”
Roughly half of the gallery’s yearly 12,000 visitors come during the three months that the Box Show is on display, and 300 to 400 people enter a lottery held each year to select new artists to fill a handful of slots.
“I think the appeal is that everyone had their own box growing up, that they kept their secrets in, or their treasures,” said Nick Corcoran, Ms. Woolfolk’s husband, who first came up with the idea for the show.
Many sights are minute: a crown of bees, a city of paper, or a pile of fingernail-sized hand-made garbage. Others are large-scale constructions, including a birdhouse-bedecked bench and a somewhat existential road sign that can be spun between “in the past” and “to-day”. There is social and political commentary, from the glaring iBox to a polar bear perched on a floe. In many pieces the box is still in its original shape, but some are unrecognizable: transformed into picture frames, wooden boats, thin sheets of wood, and more.
Fitting for the locale, many entries are rooted in the natural world. Pieces feature branches, bones, and an abundance of birds—felted, wooden, painted, chalked, and drawn. There are flaming sunsets, ceramic starfish, pinned butterflies, and dried carnations. One box is filled with upended twigs, one with medusa-like kelp strands. One displays four pieces of driftwood as if they are artifacts, inviting a viewer to savor their peaks, whorls, and sand-smoothed grain.
Another common theme is miniature vignettes. A box can’t seem to help but call to mind a smaller space that mimics our own: a model room, a tiny stage, a dollhouse. There is a diminutive hat shop, a weaving studio complete with rugs, and a glittering boutique strewn with shoes. A wooden man peers into a box-filled dumpster, accurate down to the battered Marin Sanitary Service sign on its side.
“It goes on and on,” one visitor was overheard happily observing to a companion, shortly before she burst into laughter upon discovering the provocative silicone contents of “Box in a Box”.
Funds raised from the Box Show support the gallery’s Latino Photography Project and Artists in the Schools program, as well as to cover operating costs. Over the years it has also helped fund a number of international art exchanges, where artists from Hungary, Russia and Ireland showed their art in Point Reyes, while gallery members did the same in those countries. Each piece represents a labor of love, ingenuity, and support of the gallery and the community.
The premise of the exhibit is simple: every person contributing to the show is given a pinewood box. This can be added to, deconstructed, or re-formed—but it must somehow be included in the final creation. This year one artist incinerated his box, made ink from the charcoal, and penned two soaring condors onto thick, stark paper. Even that, Ms. Woolfolk said, is just fine.
Another important tenet is that it is open to professional artists and dabblers alike: during this show, they all claim that title.
“It’s a clear playing field,” Ms. Woolfolk said. “Because everyone starts in the same place, with the box, there is a lot of camaraderie and fun.”
Before the Box Show began in 1998, the nonprofit gallery struggled to make ends meet.
“Their big fundraiser consisted of yard sales, where the members would basically buy each others’ stuff and raise maybe 50 or 100 bucks,” Mr. Corcoran said. The now-retired sculptor began to brainstorm ways to improve on the fundraiser.
A friend had recently given him a wooden ceiling fixture—essentially a frame containing 48 smaller boxes, —that sparked an idea.
“I thought we could get 48 people to each put a little vignette in each box, and then raffle it off,” Mr. Corcoran said. Soon, he dismissed the plan: such a piece would be unwieldy, and generate little more than a yard sale. But the seed had been planted: soon he thought of getting artists to create individual pieces out of boxes instead.
The first year, after begging people to participate, the gallery displayed 101 boxes; the next year, it went up to 120. By year four, they were including 150 artists and it has stayed at that level ever since. More would not fit.
The idea has been a substantial step up from yard sales. On most years, the Box Show garners about $24,000. Since they started keeping records in 2001 it has ranged from $13,000 to $27,000, when two boxes sold for $5,000 each.
Only one box ever had to be turned away; it incorporated a foul-smelling tar that rendered the gallery uninhabitable. That led to the first rule of the show: no toxic substances. Two more rules were later added: no plants, because they have to be watered, and no live animals, because the inclusion of a Chinese fighting fish in one piece caused some to worry about its welfare.
And what of the pinewood boxes themselves? For nearly all of the show’s existence, Corcoran has made them—roughly 2,720 in total. “It doesn’t take all that long; it’s just that it is boring,” Mr. Corcoran said. “There are so many of them and the repetition just drives you nuts.”
Nonetheless, Corcoran has kept at it—until this year. He cut his thumb on the table saw and decided that it is time to retire. “If there are any carpenters out there who want to donate some time, we are looking,” he said.