Avtomobile, a tiny new shop on East Liberty underneath the Bead Gallery, is hard to characterize, but it’s not hard to say. It’s pronounced–pronovnced?–“automobile.” Maris Turner, one-half of the young artist couple who owns it, takes the credit and blame for the name. “It’s from pop-up art shows me and my buddies did in New York. Our logo was a structural drawing of a car. We called it avtomobile.” He says people don’t always get the Roman u, somehow more recognizable when chiseled into courthouse mottos about jvstice.
Turner and Sara Renner, his partner both in and out of work, met at Columbus College of Art and Design in Ohio. They landed jobs that watchers of Project Runway would kill for–designing for American Eagle–and moved to New York. And then? “We were just done with the corporate thing,” says Renner.
“We thought it would be more fun to do our own thing on our own terms, in a cool town like Ann Arbor,” says Turner, who grew up in Chelsea and has a lot of friends and family in the area. Renner is from “a small farm town in Ohio. When I was little, my grandma taught me to sew. I did 4-H and all that.”
They didn’t entirely burn their bridges–both still freelance for American Eagle. In fact, a top that Sara designed (she quickly sketched it) will go on sale this winter. “Shhh, it’s kind of top secret,” she laughs.
The tiny shop is hard to characterize because of the his-and-her aspect. “I sell a lot of the girl things. I’ll alter vintage clothes or fabrics that I find. Or if it’s really awesome I’ll leave it alone,” Renner says. She shows a top she just made from a white eyelet table runner.
Turner’s framed watercolor and pencil drawings line the walls, and he has designed a “Motor City” logo that he screen-prints on T-shirts and sweatshirts, and sometimes on vintage garments, too. They sell other miscellaneous things picked up in their travels–an old Plymouth hubcap, for instance, from a recent trip to the UP. “We stopped at anything we saw alongside the road,” Turner says. “Honestly I don’t know where we were. We didn’t have a map. We just kind of drove around–this is awesome, let’s check this out, oh, it’s getting late, better turn around. It was a blast.”
Renner says she’s “already looking forward to decorating the shop this winter. It has kind of a cabin feel.”
Avtomobile, 309 E. Liberty, 369-6339. Wed.-Fri. 11 a.m.-7 p.m., Sat. 11 a.m.-9 p.m., Sun. noon-5 p.m., closed Mon. & Tues. (no website).
