Born and raised in Austria, Eins came to NYC in 1967, and settled into a small storefront in Soho in 1972 when it was still a deserted manufacturing district. When art galleries began moving into the area, Eins hid his bed behind a screen, and turned his live-in studio into a D.I.Y. exhibition…
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.
Stefan Eins’s storefront at 3 Mercer Street pointedly called itself a store, not a gallery. Doubling as Eins’s illegal living quarters with a bed hidden behind a screen, the space (which operated from 1974 – 1979) epitomized the provocative DIY populism that made Downtown New York such a creative cauldron in the 1970s.