Claes Oldenburg was born in Sweden and moved with his family to the US in the 1930s. He is best known for enormous sculptures of every day objects, like lipstick and the ice pack.He is sometimes considered to be a pop artist because his subjects come from daily life, but he also had art school credentials and serious interests in color, material and philosophy. After studying at the Art Institute of Chicago and later at Yale, Oldenburg moved to the Bowery where he befriended people like Alan Kaprow, Red Grooms, and others who were having a bit more fun than the abstract expressionists uptown, who were mostly depressed heavy drinkers. While Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock had tried to express things like truth and inner turmoil, this store front became a place for Oldenberg to make art that was funny and whimsical.

He rented this retail space for a few months in 1963, paying only 60 dollars to open a store, which he called The Store. The Store was a place to the role of art as product or commodity, which was becoming a preoccupation of many artists of the time. By 1963, the gallery scene in SOHO had made art a full fledged industry with hefty paychecks for dealers, gallery owners, collectors and the artist himself, who now had to deal with his own self promotion.

Oldenburg advertised himself and his new commercial venture with fliers and business cards based on some he had seen in a Hispanic deli. Since all the art was for sale, he wanted the space look like a store and not a gallery. This effect was enhanced by the unconventional subjects of his sculptures. The window of the store reminded visitors of the wax displays in the restaurants of nearby Chinatown. Oldenburg made plaster slices of blueberry pie, sausage links, ice cream cones, girls' dresses and underwear. Art dealers would fight over these light-hearted objects; Oldenburg's mastery of color and material betrayed a serious classical training. He claimed, for example, that he wasn't interested in ice cream as a subject or even as a social commentary on the consumption of art but because plaster and ice cream as materials behave exactly the same way. Of course, Oldenburg also has a reputation as one of the art world’s most witty, tongue-in-cheek artists. Since 1963, the number of stores in SOHO have by far surpassed the number of galleries and probably do in the Bowery, too. But Oldenburg would probably not have been too cynical about this fact, as he advocated in a famous artist statement, "I am for Kool-art, 7-UP art, Pepsi-art, Sunshine art, 39 cents art, 15 cents art, Vatronol Art, Dro-bomb art, Vam art, Menthol art, L & M art Ex-lax art, Venida art, Heaven Hill art, Pamryl art, San-o-med art, Rx art, 9.99 art, Now art, New ar, How art, Fire sale art, Last Chance art, Only art, Diamond art, Tomorrow art, Franks art, Ducks art, Meat-o-rama art."