PEARL PAINT CLOSES

Pearl Paint, that iconic Canal Street establishment frequented by New York artists for decades, has closed its doors, reports Carl Glassman in the Tribeca Trib. The store opened on Church Street in 1933, selling house paint, and for the past fifty years had operated out of its five-story, red-trimmed building at 308 Canal Street. A longtime salesperson told Glassman, “They just broke up a whole family unit here—people I’ve been working with for years. [It’s] like the people running this place don’t even understand its history and the artists who shopped here.” While branches of Pearl Paint still exist in other cities, the Canal Street site has figured in countless histories of New York artists’ practices. Artist Martin Wong once worked there as a clerk. Everyone from Marilyn Minter and Jean-Michel Basquiat bought supplies there. And in the book Painting Below Zero (2009), James Rosenquist—writing about the difficulty of executing ideas in New York—fondly referred to Pearl Paint as “that damn art-supply store.”