Good morning. It’s Monday. Today we’ll look at the art shoppers can find when they go to a Trader Joe’s in Manhattan.
Julie Averbach led the way into what she said was an art gallery.
It didn’t look like one. There were no velvet ropes in front of the most valuable pieces, and no little labels on the wall saying who had created the art.
But this was not really an art gallery. It was a supermarket, the Trader Joe’s at 2073 Broadway, near West 72nd Street, a place to experience “the joy of finding beauty where we least expect it,” Averbach said. Above the refrigerated display cases and the fruit and vegetable bins. In the aisles. On the packages that sit on the shelves.
“When we typically go to a grocery store, we tend to look straight at the shelves, put the products in our carts, buy them and go home,” she said. “I’ve come to look up, look down and go into a mode of art appreciation first and buying second. The store and the products themselves are art.” At Trader Joe’s, she said, “even a simple banana display becomes a 360-degree art installation” topped by King Kong, suspended from the ceiling.
She moved on to a mural scene above the avocados. It showed four figures dancing on the Lincoln Center steps, with the Metropolitan Opera House in the background: a package of Joe-Joe’s chocolate-and-vanilla-cream sandwich cookies, a bottle of pink lemonade, a shaker of “Everything but the Bagel” seasoning and a can of corn.
“The corn can is a recurring symbol through a lot of Trader Joe’s artwork,” she said. It turned up in a narrow painting of the Statue of Liberty a few steps away. Lady Liberty is holding a can of corn “as her torch of enlightenment,” Averbach said. In the other hand is a box of Joe’s O’s cereal. The actual statue holds a tablet inscribed with the date July 4, 1776, in Roman numerals.
Averbach is a Trader Joe’s fan with an art historian’s eye. She became so fascinated by what she saw in Trader Joe’s locations that she wrote the book “The Art of Trader Joe’s: Discovering the Hidden Art Gems of America’s Favorite Grocery Store” after devoting her thesis at Yale to Trader Joe’s as a contemporary cabinet of curiosities. She did her research on her own, based mostly on “what I could see in the stores as a regular shopper” who has visited more than 170 locations. She received no official help from the chain and put the word “unauthorized” on the cover of the book to emphasize her independence. An email to Trader Joe’s seeking comment went unanswered on Friday.
Looking for what had inspired the images in packaging like the label for the store’s Caesar salad, she spent “countless hours” eyeing Victorian ephemera and paging through 19th-century magazines. (It’s not Julius Caesar on the salad’s container; it’s Augustus, Caesar’s great-nephew and adopted son.)
And the image on the can of Trader Joe’s French roast coffee? Averbach traced it to a 1913 book, “The Spirit of Paris.”
Averbach said that Trader Joe’s is unusual among supermarket chains: Each store has in-house artists who create handmade signs, she said, so no two Trader Joe’s stores look alike. And as Averbach discovered, the artists do more than make signs.
In a Trader Joe’s in Manchester, Conn., she found a chalk drawing of a figure that looked like the famous Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci. But this one had a Trader Joe’s employee name tag with “Mona L.” written on it.
In other stores, Averbach found adaptations of Vincent van Gogh’s “Sunflowers,” Auguste Rodin’s “The Thinker,” Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” and Emanuel Leutze’s “Washington Crossing the Delaware.”
In a Trader Joe’s in Chicago, she found a representation of the late-night diner in Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks” with a Trader Joe’s sign above the window. Hopper said the restaurant in his painting was inspired by one in Greenwich Avenue in Manhattan, but the Trader Joe’s image paid tribute to the painting’s longtime home, the Art Institute of Chicago.
Averbach talked about neighborhood references as she walked through the Trader Joe’s on Broadway. That store is “hands down the busiest Trader Joe’s in the world,” the company said in 2021. Of the Trader Joe’s locations in New York, it is her favorite aesthetically. But she also mentioned the store at 436 East 14th Street, where the illustrator Peter Arkle created more than 150 images called “East Village Drawings.” They are keyed to a map in the store showing “where you can find all the real things that inspired the drawings,” according to Arkle’s website.
In the Broadway store, even the elevators doors are art, painted to show dinosaurs shopping, a nod to the nearby American Museum of Natural History. The artists have also made something of places that are off limits to shoppers, as Averbach realized after seeing the exhibition “Cubism and the Trompe l’Oeil Tradition” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art a couple of years ago.
“They could have simply written ‘staff only’ on the door,” Averbach said. “They instead used the door as a canvas for a trompe l’oeil painting,” with a green T-shirt on a coat hanger. “Who does that? It’s amazing.”
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Expect a partly sunny sky, with the temperature reaching a high of 62. At night temperatures will drop to the low 40s.
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In effect until Friday (Purim).
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Dear Diary:
Back home from Boston for the holidays, Dean and Dylan and I watched “Anora” at the Angelika because we were the last ones still on winter break.
We walked uptown afterward, laughing about the movie and about the guy next to us who had laughed though the whole movie.
I was going to turn off at 23rd Street to go to the PATH station. Dylan and Dean were going to keep walking to 33rd Street to catch the Q train.
We walked a few blocks backpedaling as the cold wind blew hard at our faces.
“I’ll see you guys again for spring break,” I said as I got ready to turn.
“I think I’ll be on a spring break trip with some school friends,” Dylan said.
“All right,” I said. “Well, some time else then. Love you bro, see ya.”