Tom Sachs

Tom Sachs (born July 26, 1966) is an American contemporary artist who lives and works in New York City. Life and early career Sachs was born in New York City on July 26, 1966, and raised as a Reform Jew. He grew up in Westport, Connecticut, attending high school at Greens Farms Academy, followed by Bennington College in Vermont. Upon graduation, he studied architecture at London's Architectural Association School of Architecture before deciding to return to the States. He then spent two years working in Frank Gehry's L.A. furniture shop, where he began using the term knolling. Around 1990, Sachs moved from L.A. to New York. He founded a studio in the disappearing machinery district downtown called Allied Cultural Prosthetics, which took its name from the previous tenant—Allied Machine Exchange—implying that contemporary culture had become nothing but a prosthetic for real culture. For a few years Sachs worked odd jobs, including lighting displays at Barneys New York. In 1994, he was invited to create a scene for their Christmas displays and titled it Hello Kitty Nativity, in which the Virgin Mary was replaced by Hello Kitty with an open Chanel bra, the three Kings were Bart Simpsons, and the stable was marked by a McDonald's logo. This contemporary revision of the nativity scene received great attention (not all of it positive) and demonstrated Sachs' interest in the phenomena of consumerism, branding, and the cultural fetishization of products.