Shopping Center of the Universe

a new work in development from artist Robin Frohardt

For the past 15 years, 2024 Herb Alpert Award-winning artist Robin Frohardt (creator of The Plastic Bag Store), has lived across the street from a Home Depot parking lot. It is visible through her window and a constant source of fascination — embodying a personal and cultural grief she’s carried since childhood. Growing up surrounded by big box stores and sprawling suburban lots, Frohardt has felt a deep, unspoken sense of loss that the project Shopping Center of the Universe now gives shape to: the loss of her identity as a natural being within a living ecosystem, and the loss of a sense of community and civic agency. Like many, Frohardt was raised in a world that treats people primarily as consumers, not citizens. And the landscape reflected that — everything built for efficiency, anonymity, and transaction. Nature became something to manicure into parking lot islands. Community was something to be marketed, not made.

The story begins in a cardboard recreation of the parking lot and the surrounding neighborhood, meticulously built by hand. Onstage, puppets and sets are activated by performers in front of multiple cameras, with the live feed projected above them alongside live narration and score— allowing the audience to experience both the handmade mechanics and their cinematic expression simultaneously.

The parking lot becomes a metaphor, examining how chain-store monoculture has hollowed out both our collective sense of public life and our connection to the natural world. Frohardt seeks to dissolve this boundary—or myth—by reframing the parking lot as part of the ecosystem, rather than separate from it.

In the parking lot, nature and neighborhood collide: tree roots break through asphalt, condensation from an air conditioner wears a hole in the sidewalk, and a flock of birds crash-lands, mistaking the lights on the pavement for the surface of water.

How does anything—even a parking lot—exist outside the natural world? Or are parking lots themselves a kind of naturally occurring phenomenon? Billions of years ago, a few cells began to divide, and now there are 3,400 Home Depot locations. These facts are not unrelated. This work is a meditation on box store shopping centers, where the parking lot becomes a metaphor for the blurred boundary between built and natural worlds—inviting reflection on the landscapes we’ve built, the ones we’ve lost, and the subtle poetry hidden in plain sight, like a parking lot seen through the right window.

Creator/ Director - Robin Frohardt
Known for her rich aesthetic and highly detailed constructions, Robin Frohardt is an award-winning theater and film director. Her narrative based films, live performance and immersive sculpture, use recognizable materials, often trash, to create richly detailed worlds with narratives that consider capitalism, and the resulting environmental catastrophe through a darkly humorous lens. Her theatrical work has earned her a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Herb Alpert Award, a Creative Capital Award and multiple Jim Henson Foundation Grants. Her play THE PIGEONING hailed by the New York Times as “a tender, fantastical symphony of the imagination,” debuted in 2013 and continues to tour at home and abroad. Her Immersive film/ theater project THE PLASTIC BAG STORE premiered in Times Square in 2020 and has since toured to major performing arts venues in Los Angeles, Chicago, Adelaide and Austin and will be open at Mass MoCA summer of 2024. Her short films have been official selections at The Telluride Film Festival and Aspen ShortsFest, where she won the Ellen Award. THE PLASTIC BAG STORE won Best International Feature at the All Living Things Film Festival and the Audience Award at the DC Environmental Film Festival.
Composer - Freddi Price
Freddi Price is a multi-disciplinary performing and recording artist, musician, multi-instrumentalist, band leader, composer, actor, and voiceover artist. Over the years he has collaborated, composed, and performed with bands, artists, and stage productions on both US coasts in addition to touring in the US and Europe with his talents and music having been featured by the likes of David Byrne, Eric Burdon, Ann Magnuson among many others on stage and on recordings. His compositions, performances, and voice have accompanied theater productions in San Francisco and New York. For his original music for Robin Frohardt’s previous NYC puppet theater piece, The Pigeoning, he was nominated for the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Music in a Play. Besides providing music for theater and some commercial work, he also performs on many instruments and voice in a variety of forms and genres, from solo to large groups, blues to rock and soul, brass band and cabaret.
Projection Designer - Jorge Cousineau
Jorge Cousineau is a filmmaker and production designer specializing in sets, lighting, sound, and projections. His work has been seen and heard internationally, regionally, and all over Philadelphia, his home for 25 years, before re-locating to Maine. Jorge is a recipient of two Independence Foundation Fellowship grants, a Lucille Lortel Award in New York City, and several Philadelphia Barrymore Awards. He was awarded the F. Otto Haas Award for Emerging Theater Artist and is a recipient of the Pew Fellowship in the Arts.