Zooming outside the artboard?

I'm going to admit up front that I find the Illustrator artboards and workspace exceedingly limiting. I get that an unlimited workspace would probably make for some really slow/buggy design at times, but I work for a sign shop that specializes in outdoor signage, and it's frustrating not being able to design to size in Illustrator. I can do it in other programs (like FlexiSign), but Illustrator is far more robust and plays well with Photoshop (which I also use a lot of). But even accepting the workspace limitation, one thing that really frustrates me is that I make a lot of customer proofs on my job where I keep some artwork outside of the artboards that is not meant to be reproduced for the proofs. That means a lot of times, I want to zoom out to look at my whole workspace where that art is, not merely the artboards.

So that's my question: Is there any immediate way to do this? It really is a pain, and I don't want to have to spend a lot of time zooming around or making artboards I'm going to be deleting later. Is there any workaround for this issue, or is it just another annoyance like the limited workspace itself?

Thanks!