Inside the NYC Plastics Shop Beloved by Artists

Bushwick artist Liz Atzberger recently wandered by a desolate stretch of Canal Street searching for an old friend and hoping it was still open.

Atzberger had been a longtime customer of Canal Plastics Center, where she would peruse acrylic offcuts, but hadn’t been to its SoHo showroom since the pandemic. To her relief, it was still there. She emerged beaming with two sheets of safety orange-colored plexiglass.

“The store is very utilitarian but the materials themselves are so beautiful and seductive and have different optical and shimmering effects in contrast to the almost bleak presentation,” she said. “For an artist, it’s like being in a candy store.”

For nearly 50 years, Canal Plastics Center has enticed artists, designers, and architects in need of acrylic swaths at a fraction of the price of metal and glass. The shop was part of a booming cluster of industrial materials stores in Lower Manhattan that began to close or move away after the turn century just as scores of galleries have opened in the surrounding neighborhood.

But the shop has remained a source of affordable art materials for contemporary artists who have been incorporating plastics into their practices as long as it remained in business. Artist Susan Weil, whose work was included in the first major traveling contemporary art exhibition featuring plastics in 1968, has been shopping there for decades.

“It’s beautiful to have a transparent or semi-transparent material, and I love the colors — it’s like how people were attracted to stained glass windows,” she said. “The plastic sheets have to be a certain thickness so as not to be wobbly. Using glass was more dangerous in making sculpture.” 

Owner Raymond Tung, who took over the business in 1994, credits art school professors for familiarizing their students to the materials in the shop and creating lifelong shoppers in the process. “Many of their artists have graduated and went all over the place but still remember us and are still our customers,” he said. 

Customers often gravitate toward pre-cut rectangles of solid acrylic either a quarter or eighth of an inch thick that workers can cut further to their specifications. But the shop also provides reams of paper-thin vinyl films on rolls that are available by the yard, long, rigid rods and tubes in dozens of hues, mirrored strips for disco balls, and clear solid cubes and spheres that bend light like prisms.

On a weeknight in December, the showroom bustled with activity like Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, neatly arranged candy-colored products gave off a faintly acrid aroma. Workers fabricated and cut orders on the second floor and packaged them in the basement.

One shopper who worked in advertising was searching for odds and ends to make a baby mobile for a TV commercial. Keenan Bellisari, an architecture graduate student at Columbia, pulled a long yellow acrylic rod that he needed for an architecture model.

The price of plastics compared with glass, stone, and chrome has made sculpture more accessible for many artists. Claire Lachow began experimenting with printing images on plastics seven years ago after she saw an exhibit of large-scale sculptures by Rachel Rossin. Lachow uses a heat gun she purchased at Home Depot and a laser cutter in a process known as thermoforming to transfer digital images directly onto clear plexiglass.

“Before I moved into sculpture it seemed intimidating not having the training to use the facilities of a shop, but with acrylic it felt more like a wide-open field,” she said. “I could find a lot looking on YouTube and the tools to manipulate it were not very expensive.”

The city’s galleries have come to rely on Canal Plastics for making custom frames and large displays for their exhibits. David Lewis gallery on Walker Street has used the shop for label covers at art fairs, double-sided box frames, dowels, armatures, and even a four foot by 12-foot tiled mirror for a current show.

“Usually I have an idea for something custom, I’ll send them a design, and we’ll go back and forth for a while,” Benjamin Heyer, operations manager at David Lewis, said. “They have a firm grasp of what’s possible.”

Plastic’s durability has also proven popular for artists constructing large-scale outdoor installations. The material can endure extreme temperatures and weather conditions at one-tenth the price of chrome or art glass, which can make a difference when public art commissions are meager.

But there are dangers to using plastics without proper safeguards. Cutting plastics can create tiny particles that can irritate people’s respiratory system and even lead to asthma and cancer over prolonged exposures while welding plastics releases fumes that cause flu-like symptoms and other hazards (Tung requires workers to wear a mask and installed ventilation systems that run when workers are grinding acrylics). 

Some artists have gone to extreme lengths to protect themselves. Williamsburg artist Jackie Slanley etches plexiglass on her laser cutter and had her landlord cut a hole in her window so she could ventilate microparticles out of her studio. Bushwick artist Julia Sinelkova wears a mask and works outside when she dissolves plexiglass and vinyl. She wants art schools to teach an intro to plastics class so students can learn to use the material safely.

“It’s so important to learn how to work with the least exposure and not get exposed to a face full of plastic,” she said. “I’ve passed out into my work. The fumes get to you.”

Then there’s the disastrous environmental effects of manufacturing and disposing of petroleum-based materials. Some 400 million metric tons of plastic are produced each year and 10 million tons end up in the ocean. Much of that are single-use items like water bottles and takeout bags, which multiple states and Canada have sought to ban.

Artist MaDore Frey has grappled with the tension of using a material that is simultaneously beautiful and toxic in her work. Recently she created futuristic-looking sculptures using Canal Plastic’s mirrored and dichroic plexiglass, which can display multiple different colors based on the light, and photographs them in a defunct granite quarry in Arabia Mountain, Georgia outside Atlanta. 

“There’s something very seductive about these materials, which will be around for a really long time,” she said. “You think of it as an artificial thing but the origins are fossil based. Every place is touched by human-made industry and existence.”