Enter Through the Gift Shop

By [Daniel Kolitz] You?d be wise to forget what you know about gallery bookstores before stepping into The Hole?s bodega-sized shop: the Bowery gallery?s new space feels more like a high-art Urban Outfitters than the stuffy art bookstores of yore. Gone are the thick, dusty volumes of Picasso prints; in their place are cheap, stylish zines and Harmony Korine screenplays. It?s all part of The Hole?s mission, director Kathy Grayson said, to demystify modern art and to give the interdisciplinary artists they work with a space to showcase the things they make. ?There are tons of people out there that are intimidated by art galleries,? Grayson said. ?It?s, like, the funnest thing in the world! It?s a free space to come look at stuff people made!? The store is raking in hundreds of dollars a day, and with good reason: much of its product is exclusive to The Hole. ?These artists haven?t made posters before. Essentially, we found 200 artists to make posters with us,? Grayson said. Among the artists are Shepard Fairey, Ben Jones and Kristy Leibowitz, whose posters can, for $75, be hung on your modern-art-starved apartment walls. (The prints are laid out like Led Zeppelin posters at a ?90s Sam Goody, which only adds to the shop?s DIY charm.) And then there are the sneakers: Native Shoes, sponsors of an exhibit over the summer by FriendsWithYou, has provided a selection of rare, colorful kicks, and Grayson says that excited sneaker fiends are in and out all day looking for them. If you?re looking to play some unusually stylish seaside sports, you can also buy a FriendsWithYou-designed beach ball from the shop for roughly $44,955 less than what an inflatable from the exhibit proper would cost you. ?Instead of having people be snobby and rude to you, you can come buy a book and some shoes and a poster and a confetti-filled egg,? Grayson said. Or a disembodied plastic breast or a limited edition, artist-designed hoodie or rare graffiti tools. Or, if you happen to be feeling flush, the actual art on display This story originally appeared in the July edition of City Arts.