RUN STORE by Susan Cianciolo

RUN STORE

BY SUSAN CIANCIOLO

CURATED PROJECT AT OAF 2026

RUN STORE, is an ongoing curatorial project by artist and fashion designer Susan Cianciolo. In the tradition of a visionary artist’s environment, RUN STORE is a recreation of Cianciolo’s home studio, a complete encapsulation of her life project, with hand painted dressers and tables, hand-sewn quilts covering the floor, and a selection of her “costumes”—a moniker which places them outside fashion and instead in history.

For RUN STORE at OAF, Cianciolo brought together artists across genre and background, including pieces by friends, collaborators, students, and inspirations. Frequent RUN collaborator Kiva Motnyk presents Pojagi-like sewn textile artworks, alongside assembled clothing pieces made for past iterations of RUN. Cult brand SC103 (founded by Cianciolo's former students Sophie Andes-Gascon and Claire McKinney) presents a hand-cut leather link lounge chair. Self-taught artist Curtis Talwst Santiago presents a selection of his jewelry box dioramas, handheld worlds of miniature scale. Artists from the celebrated Creative Growth Art Center (Oakland, CA) will exhibit a selection of hand-sewn, dyed and painted clothing pieces, designed for their Beyond Trend line, as seen in their popular annual fashion show. 

First launched in 2000 in an abandoned storefront in New York City, RUN was a store, a meeting place, and a reimagination of the economic system, all based on the shopgoer’s willingness to participate. It later traveled to the Purple Institute in Paris in 2001 and has continued to evolve over the past 25 years.

Susan Cianciolo (b. 1969) was festured in the 2017 Whitney Biennial with RUN RESTAURANT. Her work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; CCS Hessel Museum of Art, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and The Fashion Institute of Technology, New York. She is represented by Hoffman Donahue, New York / Los Angeles, Overduin & Co, Los Angeles, and CIBRIAN, San Sebastián, Spain.