A Gallery on Two Wheels: Bringing FAWW to New York by Bicycle

When I arrived in New York in June, I had a collection of screen prints, a big ambition and very little else. No gallery, no address, no contacts. FAWW Gallery had never exhibited in the city before. If we were going to find a home here, I was starting from scratch.

The obvious move would have been to find a space. But I did the sums, and the sums were frightening. Rents in New York are among the highest in the world, and to cover them I would have had to almost double the price of every print. For a gallery whose whole reason for being is to put hand-pulled, small-edition work from independent studios within reach of the people who love it, that felt like giving up before we'd even begun.

So I bought a bicycle instead.

Not just any bicycle: a second-hand yellow cargo bike, with a box on the front big enough to carry stacks of prints. I loaded it up and started riding. One day it was a park railing in one neighbourhood, the next a street corner in another. Wherever there were people, I stopped, hung the prints up and waited to see who would come.

It helped that New York lets you do this. Here, selling art on the street is perfectly legal. Since a 1996 court ruling, Bery v. City of New York, visual art has been treated as free expression, just like a newspaper or a pamphlet, so you don't need a vendor's licence to show and sell it on the pavement. For a gallery like ours, whose prints so often began life as gig posters and club flyers pasted on walls, it felt as if the city had left the door open for us.

What I hadn't fully expected was how much the bike would change the way people met the work. A gallery, however friendly, has a threshold. You have to decide to walk in, and many people never do: the white walls, the hush, the feeling that you need to know something before you're allowed to look. That feeling is exactly what our name, Forget About White Walls, has always pushed against.

On the street there is no threshold at all. People stopped on their way home, flicked through the racks, held prints up to the light and asked who made them and where. Some stayed for two minutes; others stayed long enough to hear about a print studio in Belgrade. Even cyclists pulled over mid-ride to see what was going on.

There's something very old about it, too. Long before galleries and showrooms, the street was where trade and culture first met: a crowd, a market, someone selling something they believed in. Pedalling around New York with a box full of screen prints felt like going back to that beginning.

And the bike let us be everywhere. A gallery belongs to one address; a bicycle belongs to the whole city. Through the summer and into the autumn it carried us from district to district, to people who would never have walked into a gallery. More than anything, it allowed me to connect with you.

I couldn't have chosen a better moment to arrive on a bike. New York is in the middle of a real cycling boom. The city's bike counters logged more than 15 million trips in 2024, a third more than two years earlier, and Citi Bike riders took over 2.1 million rides in January 2025 alone, double the same month in 2022, in the depths of winter. More than two million bike journeys a year now cross the Williamsburg Bridge.

Behind those numbers is something more interesting than transport. On a bike you see the city at human speed. You notice the corner shop, the neighbour, the odd yellow cargo bike covered in Eastern European screen prints propped against a park railing. Cycling has become one of the ways New Yorkers belong to their neighbourhoods.

America has been here before. In the 1890s, the first great bike boom gave ordinary people, and women especially, a new kind of freedom. Susan B. Anthony said the bicycle had "done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world." It was cheap, it was yours, and it could take you anywhere. In a country so often defined by the car, the bicycle still carries that idea: independence, affordability, a slower and more local way of living. In a city where the cost of everything keeps climbing, it's one of the few things that still puts New York within everyone's reach.

Those happen to be the values of the artists we work with. The studios and collectives behind our prints have always made things themselves, cheaply and independently, for their own communities. Carrying their work through New York on a bicycle never felt like a marketing stunt. It felt like the most honest way to show it.

We also took the bike to the Brooklyn Flea in DUMBO, where the stalls gather on the cobblestones under the archway of the Manhattan Bridge. Racks of screen prints between the vintage clothing rails, crowds drifting past, the bridge overhead. About as far from a white cube as you can get.

So, thank you, New York. I'm sure a British girl pedalling around on a big yellow bike selling Eastern Bloc screen prints barely registers among the stranger things you've seen. But I'm truly grateful to everyone who stopped, took the work seriously and never once asked why an art gallery was operating out of a bicycle.

These artworks deserve a proper gallery, and trust me, I'm working on it. But you have to start somewhere, and I'm glad we started on two wheels.

Our next stop runs from 20 November to 20 December, just in time for Christmas. Fairs and locations will be announced soon, so follow us on Instagram or join our newsletter at the bottom of this page to hear first. Until then, you can browse our new arrivals online, including work by Floating Bstrd, Matrijaršija and Dunja Jankovic.

Sarah

Photography by @fotoguybry.