The History Behind "The Facade"

Storefront for Art and Architecture was co-founded by Kyong Park and Robert Seltman, at a typical New York shop-front gallery in Little Italy. Park used his own savings and the help of some art-passionate friends to rent and renovate the old Italian coffee grinder’s place and turn it into a gallery. From the from the beginning, the mission of the gallery was to merge the aesthetic quest of art and architecture with the public life of New York.

The storefront section of the gallery eventually became a crucial part of each exhibition and performance. In addition to he physical condition, the main goal behind establishing the shoestring gallery initiated a new architectural narrative: The Facade! Over the course of the gallery's being, the facade has never been merely a frontage; it has been a still frame of the institutional mission that simultaneously captures and displays the history of the organization.

“STOREFRONT emulated the ambiance of the endemic ‘mom and pop’ stores that serviced our neighborhoods. In simplicity we hoped to facilitate function. Our function was to create a political front, a window perpetually radiating power from an underestimated art spirit de corps, a barrio art bodega. Just as each Italian social club consolidated and maintained the force of the local Italian community, we too sought freedom and means of expression for our minority, the creative underworld. STOREFRONT would represent what the art work dinosaurs, who trampled the healing herbs of our urban jungles, were not sensitive enough to perceive.”



-Robert Seltman, Starting Storefront , 1991

According to the physical and spatial condition in the new place, the whole triangular gallery space was enveloped in the facade; a solid, wooden body with less connectivity between the inner space and the public hemisphere outside. Compared to the transparent display window of the gallery in Prince Street, the facade at Kenmare Street was modest and anonymous. As per this physicality, the humble character of Storefront was preserved in the new location.

Later, the old wooden facade was physically worn through a series of projects. First in 1987, John Fekner, graffitied STOREFRONT as the stenciled word spelled out in calculator font. Unprojected Habit (1992) was the first exhibition in which the artwork harshly became a part of the facade. With the series of prefabricated portable metal toilets cut through the wooden walls, the project ironically linked an aesthetically charged space to the public domain of the street.

Not only this project penetrated the physical barrier, but also as Kyong Park mentions “the project usurps the exclusivity of cultural space by reducing architecture to its most fundamental role... By facing the toilets towards the street, open for public use, the facade “embraced social and urban functionality.”

The other site-specific installation from the same year, Pressure Buildings and Blackouts, also took control of the modest, musty-green facade. The cast concrete with fabric tension membranes used in this installation left out circular cavities on the facade. Once again, the facade emerged as the medium between the artwork and the audience. Throughout the mentioned shows, the reciprocity between the facade and the interior gallery branched out; either the exhibition became a part of the facade or vice versa.