Denim Tears African Diaspora Goods Library
Renaissance men Tremaine Emory and Theaster Gates have created a show-stopping flagship store with the Denim Tears African Diaspora Goods (176 Spring St, NYC).
We're thrilled that the African Art book collection we’ve been building for 40 years has found its home in this singular space.
“African Diaspora Goods will function as a cultural hub, expanding on Denim Tears’ narrative storytelling on the Black diaspora. The store’s design was a collaborative effort between Denim Tears’ founder, Tremaine Emory, and Theaster Gates.
Inspired by Gates’ decades-long artistic practice of archiving, elevating, and making publicly accessible historic Black images and objects, the store also serves as a community space housing a collection of over one thousand, five hundred publications on the history of the Arts of Africa alongside the label’s seasonal collections. Denim Tears invites visitors to not only shop the brand’s latest wares but also to enrich themselves with this robust selection of books curated by Lee and Whitney Kaplan, owners of the Culver City-based art book store Arcana: Books on the Arts
African Diaspora Goods will double as a comprehensive research library filled with books, exhibition catalogs, and periodicals published in Africa, Europe, The Americas, and Asia, documenting the visual and performative cultures of the Indigenous peoples of Sub-Saharan Africa. Assembled by Arcana over a span of nearly forty years, this unique resource includes material from publishers, booksellers, art dealers, and the libraries of several major collectors and academics. Denim Tears' flagship will house one of the most significant American collections of such documentation within a non-institutional setting, similar to Gates’ Johnson Publishing Company Library at his celebrated Stony Island Arts Bank in Chicago This book collection serves as a physical testament to Denim Tears' genuine commitment to storytelling, aligning with their ethos and dedication to using fashion as a vehicle to tell impactful stories about the African diaspora.”