MUSEUM QUALITY
The ICA Store is not your average gift shop
By Linda Matchan, Globe Staff | December 21, 2006
Among the many items for sale at ICA Store are lamps of various shapes and sizes. (Wendy Maeda/Globe Staff)
On a tour of the gift shop at the new Institute of Contemporary Art, manager Victor Oliveira directs your attention toward two items in particular.
One is a slender set of ceramic salt and pepper shakers that are a fine artistic rendering of chicken feet. The second is a bright red cast-iron piggy bank, modeled from an actual baby pig. (It died of natural causes, he emphasizes.)
Oliveira's point is that the museum, and its shop, are "all about challenging your perceptions." If you're looking for tea towels or refrigerator magnets, you've got the wrong museum shop. If you want scented pencils made from recycled newspapers or a lamp that looks like a weeping ghost, you're in business.
"We want to let visitors think in a creative way," Oliveira says. "Once you go through the exhibit halls, your mind is completely open to anything we have to offer. You're more apt to think, why
not chicken feet? We want people to be in awe and say, 'I've never seen this before. ' "
t begins with the fact that it doesn't look like a gift shop. It's uncluttered and airy, with windows on two sides, and it doesn't call attention to itself. The shop has no door; it's more like an extension of the lobby. There is no prominent sign that tells you it's a gift shop, which is named, simply, the ICA Store. You can access it without paying admission to the museum, or you can avoid it altogether. "The typical idea of putting a store at the end of an exhibit is the last thing we wanted," Oliveira says.
One wall of the shop ("the crown jewel," according to Oliveira) is devoted to books -- monograph, reference, and gift books on contemporary art, design, architecture, and the performing arts, as well as books for children.
The rest of the shop offers a potpourri of items of the sort you might expect to find at New York's MoMA store, and several of which you do. The inventory includes housewares, jewelry, clothing, textiles, a small collection of home furnishings, and office and pet products. You can find several items under $2.
There is some work by local artists (Oliveira aims to offer more), including Rufus Butler Seder , who makes motion art. You can buy his CineSpinner animated suncatchers starting at $12; as well as his limited edition $3,000 pieces of wall art.
What sorts of things won't the ICA sell? "Everything here has to relate back to this idea of what the museum is doing," Oliveira says. " For example, the old ICA store used to carry Ugli dolls, but those didn't make the cut here because everyone has them now. They're not a surprise."
Not that everything in the store is a surprise. It's not hard to find Philippe Starck's polycarb onate Louis Ghost Chair around town, or freeform vases by Alvar Aalto . But the Mondri Vase is something unexpected: a colorful homage to the work of Dutch artist Piet Mondrian , it can be twisted three ways to suit floral arrangements. There are interesting sculptural ebony bowls from Mozambique and natural rubber bowls from Thailand (Who would have thought a concave piece of colored rubber could be so interesting? ); and a line of breathtaking ginkgo leaf-shaped necklaces by British designer Maria Jauhiainen.
Those looking for something more conventional are not forgotten. There's an ICA tote bag, one of a number of "experience identity products" (a.k.a. souvenirs) designed by Gouda, a New York company. It s contrasting handle is "a spin on something traditional," says Kim Baker, Gouda's president.
There is the requisite baseball cap, too. It says "Open Minded" in the back and has the ICA logo on the front -- hidden inside a zippered compartment. It's meant to be a "visual metaphor for the idea of being open-minded," according to Baker.
And there are T-shirts featuring an architect's rendering of the ICA, although one architect was disconcerted to see that the image "is nearly twice as long and half as high" as it should be. "It seems like an inadvertent error of distortion," says Preston Scott Cohen, a professor at Harvard's Graduate School of Design. "It's a shame."
Ricardo Scofidio, one of the architects for the ICA, acknowledged the image is "slightly squashed," but said he doesn't know how it turned out that way and declined to comment further. "I figure that if someone with the right proportions wore the T-shirt, they could stretch it out to be the right scale."
The ICA Store, 100 Northern Ave.
Hours: Tuesday and Wednesday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Thursday and Friday, 10 a.m.-9 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. 617-478-3104.
it more or less looks like that in real life too... it looks like the mall will be nearly doubled in size after this..
