It's a surreal honor to have the shop featured in @tmagazine today as a place to visit in this overflowing city of spaces that follow suit. A heartfelt thank you to @ellara and @oddbarnacles for taking the time to listen to our story and explore the colorful offerings from our eclectic community of partners. What a beautiful way to celebrate our first month of business.
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Photo by Sean Davidson
Common Things values people over all else — artists, makers, and descendants of tradition. It feels like a well-set table in the warm and hospitable home of a worldly stranger. Quietly joyful and rooted in curiosity, it’s a retail experience that believes in the earnest art of an empathetic aesthetic — one where every object has its own history and charisma.
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Housed within a small storefront in Manhattan’s East Village neighborhood, Common Things will present a considered collection of curiosities made by intention-forward artists and designers from creative communities all around the world. It’s slow and small — emotionally astute.
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Our shop doors open to the world on September 29, 2023.
A huge thank you to Kaitlin Menza and @BusinessofHome for featuring Common Things in Shop Talk, a column in conversation with small business owners all over the country. Link in bio to read the article, and if you’re in town this week, come see the space for yourself! This Thursday we’ll celebrate the opening of our @nycxdesign showcase, ‘Finding the Light’ featuring works from @edition.cf , @blanca.cb.design , @triptychkyoto , and @juno.shen .
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Opening Cocktail
Thursday, May 16, 2024 | 6-8PM
76 E 7th Street, New York
NEW PRESS KIT [For Immediate Release] – Common Things presents Books as Objects, Books as Memory, an exhibition of artist books that reclaim the physical object as an instrument of memory. The exhibition is organized around two artist books by Rhea Karam, published by Small Editions, which emerged from the experience of her family’s wartime displacement from Lebanon in 1982.
Check out the press kit via the link in bio ⬆️
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LE COMMUNIQUÉ DE CE DOSSIER EST DISPONIBLE EN ANGLAIS SEULEMENT
BOOKS AS OBJECTS, BOOKS AS MEMORY - COMMON THINGS
📍 New York, États-Unis
📐 @_commonthings_
📷️ @rheak
#poweredbyv2com #commonthings #artistbooks #booksasmemory #contemporaryart
Join us at Common Things for “Books as Objects, Books as Memory”—proudly part of the official NYCxDESIGN Festival @nycxdesign programming from May 14-20!
This exhibition reclaims the artist book as an active instrument of memory. Centered on two works by Rhea Karam @rheak , published by Small Editions @smalleditionsnyc , the display explores the weight of history and the power of design as a witness to rupture.
Join us for a reception and talk with Rhea Karam and Hannah Pierce from Small Editions in store on May 20th 6pm-8pm
#NYCxDESIGN #CommonThings #RheaKaram #SmallEditions #ArtistBooks
Rubber Bands and a Shoebox.
Paul Labonté, @paullabonte , has been photographing the things people keep and the things they carry for over twenty years. He trained in darkrooms. He made books before he made anything else. His photographs carry the weight of someone who knows that looking is a practice, not a reflex.
The image on this puzzle is a Nike Air box, opened, full of rubber-banded bills, held in two hands. It is not a subtle photograph. It is also not what it looks like at first. Sit with it long enough and it becomes something quieter such as an object about aspiration, about saving, about the particular meaning a shoebox holds when you grew up treating it like a safe.
500 pieces. 17 by 25 inches. In the shop & online now.
An artist who changed weaving. A weaver who changed art.
That's the byline the Tate Modern put on their Anni Albers 2018 retrospective.
She didn't choose the loom. The Bauhaus steered its women students into the weaving workshop because the men running the school considered it the appropriate discipline for them. Albers thought weaving was too soft, too domestic. Thread won her over anyway.
By 1949 she was the first textile artist to have a solo exhibition at MoMA. She spent the rest of a very long life — she died in 1994, at 94 — making the case that a woven surface was not decoration but structure, not craft but thought made visible. She used thread the way painters used line: as sinuous form, as geometry, as argument.
She also said this, in 1982: "Well, you all know how great art can affect you. You breathe differently."
#annialbers #bauhaus #textileart #weaving
Common Things × 10HOUSES
April 23 · 6–9pm
Three blankets. One evening. We're welcoming 10HOUSES to the shop this spring and on April 23, from 6 to 9pm, we're gathering at 76 East 7th Street to mark it properly.
10HOUSES makes objects as a form of practice. Their throw blankets, hand-spun, dyed, and woven from ethically sourced cotton in small batches, are designed to slow things down for the bedroom, the sofa, the slower end of a long day. Each one carries the particular weight of something made by human hands, which means each one is slightly different from the next.
Three blankets will be in the shop: the Peaceful, for those who host with care. The Graceful, in deep sea blue, for those who gather us. The Blissful, in bright pink laced with magenta, for those who bring the energy that makes a room come alive.
Come as you are. Bring someone.
April 23, 6 to 9pm. 76 East 7th Street, East Village.
Battir, 1892
These terraces were not built by one person or in one lifetime. They were accumulated, stone by stone, season by season, into a system that has managed water and soil on this hillside for over two thousand years.
The irrigation channels running beneath them are Roman-era, fed by springs, still functioning. The olive trees in the valley are older than the photograph.
Battir is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, designated in part because the agricultural system here has been in continuous use longer than most nations have existed.
Photograph from the Palestine Exploration Fund archive,
c. 1892
It Must Be Heaven (2019) is nearly silent. Suleiman plays himself as a Palestinian filmmaker who leaves home looking for home, and finds that everywhere he goes, he doesn't quite belong there either. He observes. A man on a balcony watching the street. A figure at the edge of the sea. The comedy is in how precisely he sees things that everyone else has stopped noticing.
We think about this film whenever we think about why objects matter. Why does a cup, a soap block, a candle hold a kind of meaning that a place sometimes can't. You can carry a thing. You can set it on a table in a city that isn't yours and feel, for a moment, like you brought something with you.
This is an excerpt of a poem titled On This Earth (1986) by Mahmoud Darwish.
He wrote this poem in exile. He named the sensations he carried with him. The scent of bread at dawn. The hesitance of April. Moss on a stone. An amulet made by a woman for men.
He and Neruda never met, but they were doing the same thing: making a case for the ordinary. Insisting that the small, specific, tactile details of a life are not incidental.
Photo of Mahmoud Darwish is courtesy of Sayyed Mahmoud/Al-Ahram Al-Arabi — Cairo, circa 1971
"Ya Albi" means "my heart" in Arabic. Yasmeen Abouremeleh named her brand after the way her grandmother spoke about olive oil. It was not merely a pantry staple, but a cure, a ritual, a form of care. Cold-pressed in the West Bank. Single origin. Bottled in a vessel she designed herself. The oil is in the shop now, so is their story. @yaalbioil
#palestinianoliveoil
#eastvillage
![NEW PRESS KIT [For Immediate Release] – Common Things presents Books as Objects, Books as Memory, an exhibition of artist books that reclaim the physical object as an instrument of memory. The exhibition is organized around two artist books by Rhea Karam, published by Small Editions, which emerged from the experience of her family’s wartime displacement from Lebanon in 1982. Check out the press kit via the link in bio ⬆️/LE COMMUNIQUÉ DE CE DOSSIER EST DISPONIBLE EN ANGLAIS SEULEMENTBOOKS AS OBJECTS, BOOKS AS MEMORY - COMMON THINGS New York, États-Unis @_commonthings_ ️ @rheak#poweredbyv2com #commonthings #artistbooks #booksasmemory #contemporaryart](https://sp1.picnob.com/p/pt_6727291824727313141953_0_d8a7496f876a175198224f289e1f22b4.jpg?o=aHR0cHM6Ly9zY29udGVudC1sZ2EzLTIuY2RuaW5zdGFncmFtLmNvbS92L3Q1MS44Mjc4Ny0xNS82OTQzMDM1MzRfMTg1ODg2OTk4MTQwNDI4NjVfMjIxMjIwODk2NjE5MjQzNTkwNl9uLmpwZz9zdHA9YzAuMzUzLjI5OTguMjk5OGFfZHN0LWpwZ19lMzVfczY0MHg2NDBfc2gyLjA4X3R0NiZfbmNfaHQ9c2NvbnRlbnQtbGdhMy0yLmNkbmluc3RhZ3JhbS5jb20mX25jX2NhdD0xMDUmX25jX29jPVE2Y1oyZ0ZIRldpeTkyNk9ueFFpV2M4ZjRhRnFBM3hFV2xJbnhicmdYVjlrSzdoNERBMkhNWnJuNVY2bU03TEFsaWRoc2YxSXZlZm00ZVRsV0pqTzZHYXVPdUFwJl9uY19vaGM9Nm5ROXdpVFBkVm9RN2tOdndHRVhYVEgmX25jX2dpZD1FTjdLYTlKeEx5eW9CbzliMEc5eVJ3JmVkbT1BUFU4OUZBQkFBQUEmY2NiPTctNSZvaD0wMF9BZjZ1ZHhmV09PMW9NSnRkN084RmRRaWwxeElmTnRMQWYzSXdlclJ0M24yejFRJm9lPTZBMEVDNDYzJl9uY19zaWQ9YmMwYzJj&h=304817f800c38000923e4db74cffbc56)
