African Diaspora Goods
African Diaspora Goods, Denim Tears' New York flagship, opened on March 15th, 2024.
The store’s design was a collaborative effort between Denim Tears’ founder, Tremaine Emory, and Theaster Gates, an award-winning multidisciplinary American artist and urban planner.
Gates, whose art translates the intricacies of Blackness through space theory, land development, sculpture, and performance, has extended the role of the artist as an agent of change through the expansiveness of his approach as a thinker, maker, and builder. Among his many notable artistic and conceptual projects are his “land art” and creative placemaking demonstrations, which he famously undertakes through his Rebuild Foundation, where Gates purchases derelict homes and buildings on Chicago's South Side, transforming and reactivating them into affordable housing, community greenspace, artist studios and residencies, creative entrepreneurship incubators, and archival laboratories for both neighbors and visitors. 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 longside the label’s seasonal collections. This robust selection of books was curated by Lee and Whitney Kaplan, owners of the Culver City-based art book store Arcana: Books on the Arts.
This comprehensive research library is 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. It is 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 and the comprehensive archive of African Americans Visual Arts materials curated by Arcana acquired by the Getty Research Institute in 2022. This book collection serves as a physical testament to Denim Tears' genuine commitment to storytelling, aligning with our ethos and dedication to using fashion as a vehicle to tell impactful stories about the African diaspora.