Stray Shopping Carts

Featured in today's "Daily Heller" from Print Magazine's Steven Heller; a friend of Hero's and Buffalo's own, Julian Montague...

"Julian Montague, a designer in Buffalo, New York, is obsessed with shopping carts.

He writes on his website, "Over the last several decades, the stray shopping cart has quietly become an integral part of the urban and suburban landscapes of the industrialized world. To the average person, the stray shopping cart is most often thought of as a signifier of urban blight or as an indicator of a consumer society gone too far. Unfortunately, the acceptance of these oversimplified designations has discouraged any serious examination of the stray shopping cart phenomenon."

He has made it his mission to categorize "stray shopping carts" according to an intricate identification system (here). Enter at your own risk, his notions are addictive.

Starting on November 21 through December 18, two pieces from "The Stray Shopping Cart Project" will be in a group show, "Sign / Age: Lost in the Supermarket" at Armand Bartos Fine Art in New York, including William Eggleston, Martha Friedman, Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann, and more. "It seems crazy that my work is in a show with all these huge artists," says Montague, "I'm hoping the gallery people won't change their minds about me before the opening."

His project is also featured in The Design Entrepreneur by Lita Talarico and me."