Ode to the Art Supply Store

From the heights of the greatest achievements of an artist’s career  to the lowest moments of disappointment and struggle, from the early beginnings of a life of art making to the last work one might ever produce;  throughout every exhibition, every assignment, every experiment and every project that might simultaneously contain frustration and high hopes, there is a constant friend— a dependable place that all of us who make art sooner or later resort to, for richer or poorer, to love and to honor art, to meet the call of the muses aided by easels, oil paint, rabbit skin glue, washi tape and newsprint: behold the inspirational power of the art supply store.

For those who have not taken the art school route in life, the experience of being at an art supply store might be closest to the back-to-school experience of shopping for school supplies, with all the attendant smells (fresh paper, pencil, pink eraser) that are part of it and symbolize new beginnings and the growth brought by learning. But the role that the art supply store plays is much more than that: it is a lifelong relationship for the artist, much more  emotional than commercial, much more of a state of mind than a point of sale.

My first image of an art supply store goes back to my teenage years, to Casa Serra— a more than a century-old establishment located in calle Bolívar, in downtown Mexico City.  I was sent there by one of my first art teachers to buy paint brushes,  pigments and linseed oil to learn to make my own oil paints. The old location, with dusty shelves, appeared to have merchandise from a hundred years ago, dispensed by aging but agile employees.

Casa Serra in downtown Mexico City

It was quite a contrast from the stores I encountered when I arrived in Chicago to study at the Art Institute. Naturally, given the ecosystem of two thousand or so art students that populated the downtown school at any given time (a number that is in fact much greater now), as well as the many architects and designers in the city, several art supply stores were on offer: Flax on Wabash, Utrecht (which had a small location at the Columbus Drive building of the school), Favor Ruhl, and Aiko’s (a Japanese paper and bookbinding materials store) among others.

I checked with a few fellow artist friends who had worked at art supply stores during my years in Chicago to gather a few stories about their experiences. Christine Coleman, who worked at the now defunct Utrecht, recalls: “The strangest thing I remember was a flood that filled the basement of the building with water up to the top of the stairs. The restrooms were down there so we had to take the elevator in the building next door up to some (?) floor for awhile. And Utrecht’s corporate office would make us remain open on days when there was no one downtown at all. One of these days when we were open for no reason (Christmas Eve?) I think a pencil was sold. Like one single pencil.” 

Art supplies stores were critical year-round, but it was at the beginning of the school year when they became an obligatory stop for every art student trying to get their required art supplies. Coleman adds: “people would come in with shopping lists sometimes and instead of handing over the list would read aloud each item they needed and hilariously mis-pronounce names of things: ‘yellow okra’.” I probably was one of those customers Coleman served,  I believe, since on my first week in Chicago and still learning technical art terms in English I did not know what a blending stump was ( I knew it as “esfumino”), or a kneaded eraser (“goma maleable”).

I also spoke with Mexican artist Saul Aguirre, who worked at Chicago’s Genesis Art Supplies on and off for around a decade, from the time he was a high school student until after he had graduated from college. Despite the downsides ( no health insurance or paid time off) he fondly remembers the store as a place where he got a unique education of art materials, imparted by his supervisors, many of whom were artists in their own right.

Usually art stores also are conceptually, if not literally, adjacent to the underground. As a student I soon got a job at an art museum, which required for me to dress in preppy clothes- which  was quite a contrast with the students who worked in the art supply store where they could wear black shorts and heavy leather boots, sport green or orange mohawks and brandish a wide range of nose rings and tattoos, while listening to metal—probably the one genre that could be considered the official soundtrack of the art supply store. Aguirre remembers that the Genesis building “at some point housed the studio for the Poi Dog Pondering Band”, whose members would sometimes strike a conversation with him. “The other anecdote I keep close to me is always getting head bumps from self-taught artist Wesley Willis who would always come in and ask to buy poster board and have 4” [of it] cut off, and always sitting on any space available around the store when the weather was unbearable, and from time to time just outburst curse words as people went by, not expecting it, or asking clients to bump his head.”

Wesley Willis outside the shipping and receiving entrance of Genesis Art Supplies in Chicago, taken By Eric DeBat, mid-1990s (photo courtesy of Saul Aguirre)

After I came to New York in the late 90s I joined the many groups of artists who made the regular pilgrimage to Canal Street to purchase art materials— sometimes at the various plastic stores to gather expensive color plexiglass to make Donald Judd-like sculptures or just to buy clear acetate for frames— but particularly at the legendary Pearl Paint. I never got over the particularly annoying fact that one was required to pay for whatever merchandise was gathered on each floor of the store, which meant that if one needed a range of different materials one would then have to stand in line to conduct transactions three or four times per visit. But one of the great aspects of each visit was that one would almost always run into a friend or acquaintance (or a famous artist like Julian Schnabel who would purchase canvas material there) while going up and down the wide and ancient, creaky, wide dark oak stairs of the building, worn out by decades of artists’ steps. It was part of  the constant hustle and bustle of a subsector of the art scene— one that was seldom, if ever, witnessed by art critics, curators, or historians (which is perhaps why art supply stores rarely, if ever, have made an appearance in exhibitions or historical accounts of art periods).

For sure the behind-the-scenes reality of a store like Pearl Paint was no fairy tale: one could infer it from the rude attitude of some of the assistants at the counter or from the stories about employees stealing materials; let alone the public information about the owner of Pearl Arts being  sentenced to three years in prison for tax fraud. In the end, the towering store that was founded during the Great Depression and served generations of New York artists finally collapsed, as one writer puts it,  “against the flood tide of IRS investigations, bankruptcy, unsellable inventory and empty shelves.”

Still, and even though I am sure I will be accused of exaggeration or unfounded romanticism, I do believe that the  demise of Pearl Paint in 2014 was the definitive symbolic end to the world of art studios and lofts that had flourished in the 1960s in downtown Manhattan and the final marker of the transition of SoHo as it completely succumbed to yuppie fashion retailing. Interestingly, as many of us noted, the old Pearl Paint neon sign remained mysteriously on for several years, like an accidental memorial à la Dan Flavin-meets-Pop Art-meets-postmodern delirium. And maybe also as an act of unintended irony, the sign was reinstalled inside the lobby of a now gentrified residential building, turned into expensive apartments.

To me, that image of the art supply store displaced by gentrifying forces only heightens the role they play as cultural oasis of creativity in urban environments. I have felt this a number of times: once, when I was in faraway Johnson, Vermont (home of the Vermont Studio Center), a small town where a local art supply store became a small embassy of art for me during my stay there, and on the first month of the pandemic in my Brooklyn neighborhood, when every single business was shut down and we all had been languishing in lockdown for a couple of months when the local art supply store owner defiantly opened to the public one day with no prior notice — risking, I assume, a big fine and a shutdown order by the city, but making dozens of surprised customers like me immensely happy. I was delighted to touch the textures of handmade paper, look at the variety of drawing pads, the paint brushes, the origami kits.

The insight I gained at the time was that the art supply store as a site has certain advantages to the art museum: it is not about artistic hierarchies or dominating narratives. It is not sacred, nor a pristine vitrine to present masterpieces to be revered; it is a democratic launching pad of creativity. It is a station of possibility where the imagination is stimulated to see the use of every tool and every material.  It is a space where the laws of art historical gravity are suspended and where the displays instill the hunger of making.

Especially if the Strathmore 300 Series Bristol 100 lb 9x12” paper pads happen to be on sale for 50% off for a limited time only.