NEW YORK—The streets of Chelsea are lined with trucks this time of year, dropping off the art that will appear in gallery’s openings over the next month. On 24th Street today, though, there was a slightly different kind of vehicle: a New York Blood Center truck pulled up in front of the Zach Feuer Gallery to accept blood donations as “Blood Drive,” a show curated (or, as she has put it, “compromised”) by Yale MFA student Kate Levant, ends its summer run.

I had never given blood before, but the chance to make art seemed like the perfect reason to try it (apparently it takes that kind of incentive to convince me to do something nice), so I stopped by the gallery early this afternoon. Inside, Levant’s show, which features work loosely riffing on the theme of blood donation from Noel Anderson, Brian Faucette, Michael E. Smith, Elaine Stocki, and Jacques Vidal, had been rearranged to clear space for bloodletting equipment.

Visitors, which included Michael Snow, an event planner who works in the neighborhood, saw the sign, and “just wanted to do a good deed,” were welcomed with chocolates laid out on the reception desk, normally the iciest of spaces in an art gallery. “Take one, they’re good for iron, they say,” the gallery’s assistant director Lauren Marinaro informed me cheerily. (Clearly this was not going to be a run-of-the-mill gallery visit.) Next came a 75-part questionnaire and quick tests of temperature, iron, and blood pressure. “Let’s see how stressed out you are!” technician Michael Rosado joked as he strapped the sphygmomanometer to my arm. If only he knew. I had come for art’s sake, but here I was, being informed that I might experience dizziness, nausea, or a variety of other traumas.

Thankfully, Chad Smith, who was letting blood on a nearby gurney, seemed comfortable. Survival was possible. And if you have to bleed, doing it while looking at art — a cube covered with bright drawings on inkjet paper by Brian Faucette, some elegant portrait photographs by Elaine Stocki — isn’t a bad deal. “I’ve never given blood in a space that I designed,” Smith said. “Or any art gallery.” He had designed the space, he explained, after being asked by his friend, Zach Feuer himself, who took Smith’s place on the gurney.

Like me, Feuer had never given blood before. “It’s going a little slowly,” he remarked, staring at the bag of blood filling below his arm. Of course, he completed the whole process in about 10 minutes, while I continued to slog through my less-impressive performance, clocking in at slightly over 20 minutes for my one pint (eight more pints than were required to fabricate Marc Quinn’s Self (1991), a sculpture of a head composed of blood). Feuer agreed to hold the show after one of his artists, Justin Lieberman, who taught Levant as an undergraduate at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, referred her to him. Yale had reportedly refused to let her stage the project on its campus.

As the needle was removed from my arm, I wondered, Had we all just made art? Rirkrit Tiravanija cooks Thai food for gallery visitors, Tino Sehgal’s performers accost you, and now artists want our blood? “I don’t think it’s a performance,” Levant explained, as I enjoyed a juice box and cookies, holding the folio of work she and fellow Yale MFAer Ryan Waller assembled as a reward for donors. “It’s more of an event that each person gets to go through and learn things.”

“Do you know where your blood is now?” Levant asked, motioning toward the picnic coolers scattered about the gallery. “Blood is your most personal thing. But it’s going to someone else. It’s going to be theirs.”

The blood drive runs through 7 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 3. “Blood Drive” closes Sept. 4.