In Art News

In late 2006, the Anthropologie clothing store in downtown Seattle
had this great installation. The soaring, two-story wall at the back of
the store was covered in layers—layers upon layers upon
layers—of brown paper, folded and crumpled like the elaborately
draped fabrics of the store’s expensive dresses. When you looked at the
wall, you thought: looks like earth. Like the sedimentary layers of a
geological cross-section. Like Anthropologie is in the grip of a
force of nature.

The design wasn’t in any of Anthropologie’s other stores, the
manager told me in
a phone interview last week: “Everybody gets
their unique twist. Nobody had a
wall like us.”

But back in 2005, two East Coast artists named Wade Kavanaugh and
Stephen Nguyen did have a wall like that. They created it. They
say Anthropologie stole it.

The photographic documentation is damning. In May 2005 at a
nonprofit arts space in Portland, Maine, called The Map Room, Kavanaugh
and Nguyen covered the walls with brown paper and called their
installation Striped Canary on the Subterranean Horizon.
The Map Room is embedded in a hillside, and the artists wanted to
“reveal” the earth behind the walls.

“Armed with nothing but brown Kraft paper and staples, Wade
Kavanaugh and Stephen B. Nguyen transformed the into a space
both familiar and foreign,” Sculpture magazine touted
in
its April 2006 issue. The magazine
featured two full-color
photographs with the story.

Months later, that very design appeared in the Seattle
Anthropologie. The artists heard about it through a Seattle-based
friend in October 2006 and contacted prominent copyright attorney John
Koegel (Jeff Koons’s lawyer), Kavanaugh explained last week in an
interview at Suyama Space in Seattle, where he currently has a solo
show. Koegel, Kavanaugh said, made no headway with Anthropologie, and
the artists, unfortunately, have no further recourse.

“We had no rights because the piece that we did was in a
nonprofit context,” he said—but if Striped Canary on the
Subterranean Horizon had worn a price tag and shown in a commercial
gallery (or if the artists had applied formally through the copyright
office for their nonprofit temporary installation), the artists could
sue for copyright infringement.

This week, the manager at Anthropologie told me I’d have to talk
to corporate (the “visual merchandising team” at “our home office”)
in order to find out more. In response to my query, public-relations
director Sarah Goodstein sent me an e-mail that avoided specifics even
though I’d asked about the wall in downtown Seattle. “Although [our
designers] look to the outside world for inspiration, including other
artists, their display installations are original,” Goodstein wrote.
“If an artist approached Anthropologie, however, regarding perceived
use of their work, we would be sensitive to their concerns.”

So, Anthropologie: Where’s your sensitivity now?