Storefront for Art and Architecture

Storefront for Art and Architecture is an independent, non-profit art and architecture organization located in a distinctive triangular ground-level space at 97 Kenmare Street in Manhattan's SoHo neighborhood, New York City. Founded in 1982, the organization is committed to the advancement of innovative positions in architecture, art, and design. It has established itself as one of New York's most committed venues for promoting the work of emerging architects and for fostering dialogue between artistic practice and public policy, operating through exhibitions, events, competitions, and publications.

Storefront for Art and Architecture was founded in 1982 by Kyong Park with R.L. Seltman and Arleen Schloss in a tiny storefront at 51 Prince Street. Its founding mission was to support the idea that art and design have the potential and responsibility to affect public policies which influence the quality of life and future of all cities. With co-director Glenn Weiss from 1984 to 1986, Storefront implemented its civic dialogue and activist project format and relocated to its Kenmare Street location. The artist Shirin Neshat co-directed Storefront with her husband Kyong Park until the mid-1990s, and Park served as executive director from the organization's founding until 1998. The organization's programming has consistently balanced solo and group exhibitions with ideas, competitions, and exhibitions that address New York City issues with social implications. Early topics included the polluted Gowanus Canal in 1983, New York City homeless shelters in 1985, preservation of Adam Purple's Garden on Eden in 1984, and the removal of Richard Serra's Tilted Arc in 1985. In 2011, Storefront responded to the Occupy Wall Street movement by calling for public submissions of ideas for improving communication with economic and political powers. In 2017, Storefront founded the New York Architectural Book Fair, which consisted of salons in private libraries, an exhibition at Storefront's gallery space, and a network of pop-up architecture book collections in partnership with local bookstores and cultural organizations.

Storefront's programming encompasses exhibitions, events including performances, artist talks, film screenings, and conferences, competitions, and publications. Exhibitions have ranged from single-artist site-specific installations to thematic group shows addressing issues from new technology to the social and political forces that shape the built environment. The organization also provides a forum for discussion of contemporary issues through book discussions, film screenings, or performances with the goal of exposing innovative ideas. Storefront has organized traveling and pop-up initiatives, including the Pop-Up exhibition CCCP: Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed, held in an unused portion of a print shop on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles from April 11 to May 17, 2008, featuring Frédéric Chaubin's photographs of late Soviet architecture. The organization has also convened a series of talks titled Postopolis! in New York in 2007, Los Angeles in 2009, and Mexico City in 2010 to reflect on the current state of cities and design practices. In 2014, Storefront led the project Letters to The Mayor, which Domus journal described as a program designed to highlight the sometimes overlooked relationship between architects and local political authorities and to facilitate new conversations between them.

While Storefront functions primarily as an exhibition and programming venue rather than a traditional collecting institution, its exhibition history includes significant early presentations by figures who became major voices in contemporary architecture and art. Early exhibitors included Lebbeus Woods, Coop Himmelblau, Dan Graham, Carolee Schneemann, Michael Sorkin, Richard Serra, Imre Makovecz, Neil Denari, Zvi Hecker, SITE, Steven Holl, Thom Mayne, and Tehching Hsieh. The 1987 exhibition Bodybuildings was the first solo show of the New York-based architecture practice Diller + Scofidio. In 2006-2007, the exhibition Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines, organized by architectural historian and curator Beatriz Colomina, addressed the important role of independent architecture publications in the architectural movements of the 1960s and 1970s. In 2009, the Spacebuster, a portable, expandable pavilion designed by Raumlabor to transform public spaces of all kinds into points for community gathering, traveled throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn for ten consecutive evenings hosting various community events. In 2012, Storefront teamed up with design studios Family New York and PlayLab to help add exposure for the +POOL project, as part of the Storefront Starter initiative. Several exhibitions have specifically worked with the Acconci/Holl facade as a key element of design, including SO-IL's design for the Blueprint exhibition, and Abruzzo Bodziak Architects' design for the exhibition Architecture Books, Yet to be Written, the anchor program for the 2018 New York Architecture Book Fair.

Storefront occupies a triangular ground-level space at 97 Kenmare Street in SoHo, New York. The gallery is nearly 100 feet long and tapers from 20 feet to 3 feet at its west end. The space sits at the intersection of three neighborhoods: Chinatown, Little Italy, and SoHo, representing three radically different cultural sectors. The most distinctive element of the building is its facade, redesigned in 1993 through a commission to artist Vito Acconci and architect Steven Holl, their second collaboration. The resulting project transformed the structure by placing rotating panels of various orientations along the length of the gallery's facade. The facade is constructed from a hybrid material between concrete and recycled fibers. When the panels are open, the design dissolves the boundary between the gallery and the street, creating a dialogue between the experimental projects inside and the city outside. Though the original design was intended to last only two years, it has remained since its completion in 1993. The facade underwent restoration in the summer of 2008. The first exhibition presented after the installation was Upstairs Down. The Pit, The Tower, The Terrace Plateau by Peter Noever in January 1994, curated by Kyong Park, Shirin Neshat, and Peter Noever.

Storefront for Art and Architecture is located at 97 Kenmare Street in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. The organization is an independent non-profit, accessible through its ground-level triangular gallery space. Its website is http://www.storefrontnews.org. The organization continues its mission of advancing innovative positions in architecture, art, and design through its active programming of exhibitions, events, competitions, and publications, maintaining its role as a significant venue for emerging architectural and artistic practice in New York City.