The Storefront Method

Abstract

Long held as a critique of postwar consumption, Claes Oldenburg’s The Store (1961) took place in a storefront on the Lower East Side, an area at the center of federal intervention into Black and Puerto Rican poverty. This article reinterprets The Store through comparison to Mobilization for Youth (MFY), an anti-poverty organization that operated next door. Both shared an environmental “method”: the operational use of the storefront. MFY revolutionized the practice of social welfare by opening “storefront centers” that integrated its programs into resident’s daily lives by placing its clinics next to neighborhood shops. Using the storefront as a gallery and performance venue, The Store similarly repurposed its space. By aligning Oldenburg and MFY, the article proposes that the transformation of labor circa 1961—when automation began to displace the former industrial workers targeted by MFY—has been overlooked as constitutive to The Store’s meaning. Moreover, the article argues that the politics of The Store’s heralded return to realism are productively described by MFY’s postwar practice of liberal reform.