Since 2007, New York City’s New Museum has sat on the Bowery, with Rivington Street to its south and Stanton Street to its north. From the outside, the 11-story building looks like a stack of boxes, an architectural nod to the sometimes challenging contemporary art the museum displays. Over the course of almost 20 years, that’s included exhibitions focused on the connection between art and technology; the New York of 1993, 30 years on; and contemporary couture.
This month, the museum’s fourth floor became a place to explore Target by Design, a New Museum Retail Experience, a shoppable show celebrating the accessible design and creativity at the center of the retailer’s identity.
“Across every aspect of our business and brand experience, our belief in the power of great design for all guides how we deliver what our guests have come to expect from Target: amazing style, thoughtful design, and incredible value,” says Michelle Mesenburg, Target’s chief brand officer.
To illustrate that point, the show highlighted custom products that brands and designers had created for Target over the years, including shirts, dresses, a cooler, and a skateboard, all adorned with hang tags that blurred the line between art and commerce.
In the first of the Target by Design’s three sections, The Archive: Design Is in Our DNA, pieces were displayed on conveyor belts and mechanical clothes racks, refashioning an everyday shopping experience as pop art. A zoetrope also tracked the evolution of Target’s carts. From there, visitors made their way to The Store: Designed for Discovery, where shopping carts and baskets hung from the ceiling, and where a series of doors led to discrete rooms housing installations built around seven store categories, including style, home, kids, food, wellness, and beauty. This section also featured Bullseye the Oracle, which dispensed wisdom and gifts to visitors, and a selfie room, home to a collection of red spheres with cameras embedded in them.
But it was the last room, an ode to the Target bag—featuring shopping bags reimagined by designers including Dao-Yi Chow and Maxwell Osborne from Public School New York, Venus Williams, Daniel Arsham, Chloë Sevigny, and more—that commanded the most attention. Chow and Osborne presented a clean, practical interpretation of the bag, dressing it in Target’s distinctive red and hanging a detachable pouch beneath its handle. The artist Laila Gohar added pant legs to the bottom and buttons and a shirt collar to its top. And Williams produced a white version of the bag overlaid with tennis netting.
“For me, the best style has a real sense of individuality,” Williams says. “I loved taking something as familiar as the Target bag and bringing in a material that’s so familiar to me like tennis netting to give it a completely different energy. It’s a mix of function, fashion, and personal expression that makes an everyday object feel entirely new.”
The exhibition as a whole—which opened with a party—embodied that idea. Taken together, the three rooms felt as though a Target store had been liquefied and reconstituted in the New Museum, its aisles now gallery walls, its displays eye-catching, immersive installations. As attendance swelled, visitors floated from one area to the next, propelled by a soundtrack of funk hits from the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s. There were plenty of double-takes, the attendees silently taking stock of the objects on display as the intellectual borders that demarcate the creative and the commercial dissolved in real time. Suddenly, a piece of tableware like a cloche became a different sort of object entirely, its stainless-steel contours at once purposeful and ornamental.
The descriptions beneath each product helped convey this idea, and explain Target by Design as a whole, but a single phrase on a red door might have summed up the show best: “Thoughtful design lives in every detail.”
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