Fashion Moda

The rapid growth of the city’s non-profit art spaces was rooted in a shortage of galleries and other exhibition venues. But there was also an emerging political awareness that some groups were being systematically excluded from mainstream art. Fortuitously, newly available government funding for the arts happily coincided with a…

When Stefan Eins opened the art space Fashion Moda in the South Bronx in 1978, he hoped that the unlikely setting, one of the country’s most devastated neighborhoods, would stir the creativity of his Downtown peers.

In 1982 the idea of the DIY artist store went mainstream when the upscale German exhibition documenta 7 asked Stefan Eins & Jenny Holzer to create a Fashion Moda Store.

The downtown art world of the 1970s and ’80s was mostly separate from the established uptown galleries where works sold for high prices to the art elite. Downtown was a low-budget affair, a place where artists exhibited in shabby do-it-yourself spaces that catered mostly to other young and broke artists.