Well, why not?

- Traffic Judge, Missoula, Montana, when I asked if I could pay a speeding fine with art for the courthouse.

The IAP or Itinerant Artist Project - "exchanging art for hospitality across the United States" - is a series of painting road trips that I have made in order to take fine art out of the gallery and into other people's everyday lives. At the project's core is my desire to live by my creative work while removing art from its conventional, commercialized context and restoring it to the realm of gift and gift exchange.

On tour I stay mostly with strangers: people who've heard about my project – through the Internet, email chain messages, word of mouth and other means – and have volunteered to host. I typically spend 2-4 days in a household before moving on. Wherever I end up, I paint one or two small-panel landscape paintings per day, focusing on what I see around me. I give one of the paintings from each location to my host or host family

The project started in 2000, with an 11-week tour that took me coast-to-coast and back. Since then I've done a dozen tours and several residencies, averaging a month per year on the road. The scope of the tours has been national, regional, and local. In 2010 I even began a variation of the project in my hometown, Rochester, NY (see: roc-art tour blog).


MEDIA COVERAGE has been integral to my conception of the project, allowing the ideas behind the IAP and the resulting artwork to reach a large audience. The first tour led to a feature in American Artist magazine; the 2007 tour drew the attention of the Christian Science Monitor, the Today Show, Canadian Public Radio (CBC) and other national and international media.

While the IAP aspires to contribute to the cultural dialogue, the essential interaction is the very personal, intimate dialogue between me, my painting process, my hosts and the places where they live. In many ways the IAP allows for something approaching an ideal realtionship between artist and patron, art and public.


ON TOUR I stay mostly with strangers: people who've heard about my project – through the Internet, email chain messages, word of mouth and other means – and have volunteered to host. I typically spend 2-4 days in a household before moving on. Wherever I end up, I paint one or two small-panel landscape paintings per day, focusing on what I see around me. I give one of the paintings from each location to my host or host family.
Thus far the project's tours have covered over 20,000 miles, bringing me to more than 120 homes in 36 states. I've spent a total of about 375 days on the road and completed over 550 paintings of the varied American landscape.

Along the way, I've driven too much, slept too little but enjoyed a rich quality of sharing with the people and places I encounter. I have been particularly heartened to find that people who would be reluctant to pay for art – from young middle-class parents in Wisconsin to millionaires in Maine and San Francisco – will nonetheless, and with great generosity and enthusiasm, welcome an artist into their lives to see what he will paint. Lately I have introduced spontaneous bartering into the project and have bartered successfully for meals, commercial lodging, museum admission, and to pay a speeding fine (fine art!).

It has been an unpredictable, challenging and deeply rewarding adventure.


THE PROJECT now also includes a series of exhibitions and presentations I've given at colleges, high schools, museums, libraries, retirement homes and teacher's conferences. Recently I've learned that the project was discussed in a Chinese web forum and has inspired younger American artists to hit the road.


Please see the Itinerant Artist Project section of www.jimmott.com for more complete background information, trip reports, tour routes, portfolios, press coverage, and so on.