?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 500 - $ 750
VARIOUS ARTISTS [SHOPPING BAGS.] Circa 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Group of 46 bags. Sizes vary. Conditions vary, generally A. Paper. Collecting shopping bags is nothing new. As early as 1979 the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum organized an exhibition called "Bandboxes and Shopping Bags," and other institutions have followed suit. The Newark Public Library has had an exhibition on shopping bags every year since 2000, and there have been exhibitions in Connecticut in 1992, California, at U.C. Davis in 2000 and the Montana Museum of Art and Culture in 2007. Shopping bags began to become more innovative in 1979 when John Jay became Bloomingdale's creative director. "By the 1980s . . . Bloomingdale's pioneered a more elaborate approach, introducing an ever-changing series of shopping bags: almost overnight, they came into their own as design objects" (Smithsonian Magazine, December 2006). Dolph Gotelli, professor in the Department of Environmental Design at U.C. Davis, describes shopping bags in a phrase that will resonate with poster collectors, "Art meets design on the street." Major department stores, fashion designers, art museums and independent boutiques now are all aware of the advertising effects that come from placing catchy graphics onto the ubiquitous shopping bag.
![VARIOUS ARTISTS. [SHOPPING BAGS.] Circa 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Group of 46 bags. Sizes vary.](https://catalogue.swanngalleries.com/full//935\645935.jpg)
