Christine Hill Christine Hill's Small Business

Hyperallergic Oct 05, 2013

I had just finished reading The House of the Seven Gables when I encountered Berlin-based American artist Christine Hill’s artist-shop “Small Business,” the current iteration of her ongoing project Volksboutique, which has taken the form of a number of shops, “organizational ventures,” and interventions with commerce since 1993. In Volksboutique, as its name suggests, Hill marries a can-do American optimism in the tradition of the New England Transcendentalists to the aesthetics of East German labor politics. In fact, one can easily imagine Hawthorne’s “So wholesome is effort! So miraculous the strength that we do not know of!” splashed across one of the “motivational” posters Hill often hangs in her installations, with sayings like “Make the most of what you’ve got!” hand printed in cheerful blue and red ink.

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