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Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Provisioning Beauty: The Shopping Bags of Dorothy Thurman.
Dorothy Thurman is an archivist, documentarian and historian. Her practice started with the simplest of motivations: an appreciation for the design, materials and beauty of shopping bags.
This appreciation - coupled with a rebellion against disposability - formed the genesis of what has become an active, substantial archive of retail shopping bags.
Focusing on Manhattan, the collection chronicles decades of shopping and provisioning, forming a time capsule of successive mercantile eras in the life of the city.
The archive also represents a diaristic catalog of a particular shopper, an individual living their unique life in interaction with a specific temporal economy -- an individual, in this instance, who is always attentive to surrounding beauty – even that of alleged ephemera.
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Provisioning Beauty: The Shopping Bags of Dorothy Thurman is on view through February 16 at the Adjacent To Life gallery hosted by Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).