#022ATM

No Shame
New York, NY

Program: Exhibition
Client: Storefront for Art and Architecture
Size: 100 ft2

Team: Wesley LeForce, Dong-Ping Wong
Collaborators: The Office of PlayLab
Status: Completed
Year: 2013

from Storefront:
No Shame: Storefront for Sale
May 1 – June 8, 2013

An exhibition that examined how museums and cultural institutions, fueled through private funding, have adopted a system and tradition of celebrating donors to the extent that every single public space can eventually be named.

Contemporary funding strategies for public spaces of cultural production are increasing and diversifying. Within this condition, cultural institutions, funded primarily through individual or corporate giving, have established a complex relationship with donors and funders that sustain and make possible the projects at the core of their mission. In some cases, the entrepreneurial nature of donors has produced a new branded landscape with agendas, objects, or even named buildings that might go beyond the institution’s initial goals. By crowdsourcing artists for new connections between capital and culture, No Shame: Storefront for Sale created a space to investigate experimental ways of exchanging capital and culture, so that every corner of Storefront—from office chairs to the air between its panels to the noise of a 5pm Friday traffic jam—was for sale.

No Shame: Storefront for Sale aimed to guide visitors through a critical history of funding for cultural production, and imagined a scenario of total commodification. The exhibition presented a photographic survey of privately funded spaces connected to New York cultural institutions alongside the works of eight artists, architects and designers, who were invited to envision a critical commercial campagin of Storefront’s assets. Each project presented a new taxonomy of valuable aspects the institution holds or represents in relation to the city and the citizen, unveiling untapped forms of connection between capital and culture production. The show experimented with the different ways in which individuals, companies, collectives, or nations could fund and acquire different aspects of the non-for profit institution.

Participating artists and architects included Fake Industries Architectural Agonism (Urtzi Grau+Cristina Goberna), Jesse Hlebo, Interboro Partners, item idem, Playlab+Family, Luis Urculo, and Softlab.