Vision
What I want is a more inclusive critical creative sphere, approached through an expanded notion of what retail can be. I want to legitimize the potential of retail to be a site of community, inclusivity, learning, and change.
Background
I need to give some framing so that you understand where I’m coming from:
In 2016, I founded an experimental retail shop called Days LA. Aided by my background in the contemporary, conceptual art world and the fashion and retail world of New York and Los Angeles and my intersectional queer and feminist perspective, the project of Days synthesized elements of these complementary yet distinct genres.
Using a sort of gallery model, each iteration of the shop would begin with a theme such as imagined cities (Cities of Days, 2018), I sculpted using a moveable collection of design projects, plants, food, lighting, interactive events, objects, words, and ideas to form something different than they were on their own. In working curatorially in a collaborative, socially engaged, and participatory practice, I eschewed singular in favor of multi-layered voices, turning a retail shop into Days, a site of creative exploration and critical thinking, entering into what I call “discursive commerce.”
After eleven iterations of Days and multiple well-received museum collaborations, I have seen how commerce can be a medium through which commentary, content, and the conceptual become broadly accessible to people.
Problem
The problem is that retail is so ubiquitous as to be almost invisible in the landscape. I have talked to many people about, and experienced for myself, how anything attached to a profit-generating consumer model (business) quickly loses its legitimacy in the art and critical worlds as it becomes a self-fulling portrait of business-making.
Solution
But, I have also experienced that hiding within this consumer sprawl is a sense of untapped possibility to use these sites to foster connections, educate, pollinate, seed, and empower. And the reasons why to do this are not only altruistic but can have long-term positive financial and social benefits (solidarity economics).
Purpose
Legitimizing the potential of retail to be a site of community, new ideas, and change to multiple stakeholder groups can make it more legible as a site of engagement.
By taking seriously the role fun and accessibility experientially play in creating a sense of openness in makers, facilitators, and customers, we can recognize how context can foster receptivity to new information and learning.
Opportunity
I’ve currently begun the process of legitimization by deepening my investigation into the transdisciplinary methods in which art connects commerce, fashion, and craft, as well as extra-institutional learning methods and structures of care. By developing the necessary scaffolding for such ideas, there are myriad possibilities I am exploring for wider collaboration, development, and application.