In the 1970s, the chain-store Best asked James Wines to make sculptures for their storefronts. Instead, he turned their buildings into works of art. Pictured here, Wines’s Best store in Houston, Texas.

State of the Art

For more than five decades, architect James Wines has pushed for public art to be less self-serious. His first visit to Manhattan’s Hudson Yards suggests why

By Bianca Bosker

In 1970, the sculptor turned architect James Wines, then 38 years old, agreed to design the sort of building no self-respecting artiste would usually touch: a suburban big-box store. Wines, who was friends with artists such as Cy Twombly and Robert Rauschenberg, had devoted years to welding steel and concrete into abstract sculptures. He had exhibited with prominent galleries, including Marlborough, won a Guggenheim Fellowship, and seen his sculptures installed on university campuses. The owners of Best, a since-closed chain of stores, tried to commission him to make art for the outside of their all-you-can-buy shopping centers. Wines refused. Those plopped-down sculptures—“turds in the plaza,” he now calls them—were old-fashioned and irrelevant. His counter-offer: Why not make the buildings the artwork instead?

The result was nine big-box stores that looked like Walmarts in the midst of a nervous breakdown—corners ripped off, bricks tumbling down from the façade. They launched the now 91-year-old Wines’s ongoing crusade to blur the boundaries between art, architecture, and public space.