Donkey Business

Donkey Business is an app created by the artist Lucas Blalock on the occasion of the 2019 Whitney Biennial. The app provides an augmented reality experience of the billboard installation Donkeys Crossing the Desert located on the south side of Gansevoort Street catty-corner from the museum and at the end of the High Line.
The augmentation fleshes out the billboard into a 3d experience that can be viewed through your tablet or phone. The app will work on any copy of the image including postcards available in the Whitney bookshop.


About the work

Donkeys Crossing the Desert is a kind of tragi-comic allegory about making one’s way through a difficult expanse and persevering in times of scarcity. Conjuring the willful and stubborn beasts of burden, Don Quixote, and contemporary liberals, the donkey is also the traveler—is on a quest—is surviving.


About the artist

Lucas Blalock usually works in photography often using common objects as his subjects and utilizing the nearly universal legibility of the medium as means to explore relationships to our world and suggest new ones. This piece is developed out of Blalock’s continued interest in the virtual potentials of technological images.

Thank you to the Whitney Museum of American Art for their support for this project.