Grocery Giant Trader Joe’s Hides Art in Its Aisles. This New Book Reveals Just Where to Look
Julie Averbach spent four years visiting more than 150 Trader Joe’s stores and hunting down the retailer’s art-historical sources.
by Min Chen
One day, at a Trader Joe’s grocery store, Julie Averbach picked up a box of caesar salad and was immediately struck by its label. Besides announcing the package’s contents, it contained an image of Augustus of Prima Porta, the first-ever sculpture carved of the Roman emperor. The lid of a plastic salad bowl was an unlikely (if admittedly witty) place to slap on a 1st-century C.E. statue, but Averbach soon discovered that elsewhere in Trader Joe’s—across its products, signs, and murals—were countless other nods to art. “The entire store,” she told me over email, “was a trove of art.”
That revelation sent Averbach on a mission. Over the course of nearly four years, the art history major visited more than 150 Trader Joe’s stores across the country to uncover how they deploy visual art in packaging and marketing. What she found was enough to fill a book: The Art of Trader Joe’s, which identifies and unpacks an abundance of iconic works featured in the stores—from the detail of the Birth of Venus on a tin of Italian Roast to a sign in Chicago that references Starry Night with the superb slogan “Your Gogh-To Neighborhood Store.”
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