Tiny Skulls, Paper Flowers: Artlover Imports Mexican Color to East Village
Dina Leor sits perched on a small chair in a three-foot space at the back of her shop. The chair wouldn’t fit anywhere else among the store’s crowded shelves, and barely tucks behind the counter, also nearly obliterated by trinkets, save for a few inches where customers can sign receipts.
From her roost, Leor watches a woman admire a teal-tailed mermaid hanging from one of many crisscrossing wires, just above eye level. She shifts the items she’s already holding to one hand and reaches for the mermaid, asking the price.
The mermaid costs $45, Leor tells her, then immediately drops the price to $40, since she can tell the woman loves it.
Leor understands the shopper’s impulse to go home with one of everything. That is precisely how she ended up opening La Sirena, a Mexican folk art store in the East Village.
While working as an art therapist at Bellevue Hospital in the 1990s, Leor took every possible vacation day to travel to Mexico, or “México lindo y querido,” as she calls it. Beautiful, beloved Mexico.
She visited Oaxaca, Puebla and Tlaxcala, diving into the world of artisanal goods as a way to shake off the stresses of her Manhattan career life, collecting pieces she loved. She found tiny dolls that looked like Frida Kahlo, big dangling gold earrings and decorative skulls painted in bright colors.
“I would get to know the artisans and they would invite me over,” Leor recalls, drifting between English and Spanish. “Now I always feel like family when I go.” Instead of a business transaction, she treats her visits like meetings with friends. “I hang out with them, make stuff with them, eat with them,” she said.
La Sirena is the only store in New York that exclusively sells Mexican folk art, Leor says, but she is not Mexican herself. As an Argentine-American born and raised in Manhattan, she sometimes surprises people with her knowledge of Mexican culture, learned through frequent trips to Mexico since childhood. Her mother would sublet their apartment most summers to take her traveling and immerse Leor in her Latin culture.
After learning so much about Day of the Dead figurines and intricate paper flowers, she has deemed herself “Argentina-Americana, con un corazón Mexicana” — Argentine-American with a Mexican heart.
A calm woman with thick, shoulder-length wavy hair, Leor first sold items from her folk art collection at a weekend market on St. Mark’s Place. She also brought artworks from her latest trip to work, selling them to colleagues at lunchtime. She didn’t expect to earn much profit, just to share the art and to keep her collection from growing too large.
The funky shop on East Third Street was born out of coincidence. Leor, 54 , never considered full-time entrepreneurship until 1998, when she returned from a trip to Veracruz. The hospital announced job cuts, including her own position, but she felt secretly relieved.
“I was the only one in line with such a smile on her face,” she says of the layoff.
She planned to open a creative arts day care for children, something she had done before working at the hospital. Unemployment checks kept her biggest financial worries at bay. But while visiting a kid’s consignment shop to post some promotional flyers, she noticed that half the retail space was for rent.
“A lightbulb went off,” she recalls. “I had never thought of having a store in my whole life until right then.” After having just told the owner about her day care, she blurted the thought aloud: “‘I don’t want you to think that I don’t want to have a day care, but I’ve always dreamed of having a store.’ It just came out of my mouth.”
Leor opened La Sirena on Avenue B in 1998, paying $500 a month for the space. The response was explosive. Within a month, she was featured in Time Out magazine and the New York Times, and had lines of customers out the door. She brought her romantic partner in for backup.
“After being in the Times, I told my partner ‘You have to come help me,’ because people were waiting in line in the snow to get into my little Sirenita,” she remembers.
At one point, he held an item overhead and yelled out to ask the price — but she couldn’t see him in the thick crowd. “I broke down laughing so hard I was I was crying. The emotion was so big, that this had happened. It was meant to be.”
The shop sold out of nearly every item in its inventory, and customers had to place orders for things like Mexican chocolate. Leor happily took $7000 from weekend sales and flew to Oaxaca to buy more art, shipping home 11 crates of items — only to return to the news that she had to vacate the space within a month due to a lease buyout.
The crates crowded Leor’s East Village apartment for months while she lived on her credit cards, until a loyal new customer tipped her to a potential new storefront. The tip brought her to her current Cooper Square location, where her collection expanded into the tangle of color it is today.
The shop contains hundreds of one-of-a-kind items whose stories Leor loves to recount to customers, expressing reverence for the time-consuming artistry of embroidering a blouse or telling a shopper about the man who paints these clay sculptures.
Though Leor doesn’t haggle with the artisans she visits in Mexico four times a year, she is willing to knock off a few dollars for an appreciative customer. She recalls when a woman with only $20 came into her Cooper Square shop, hoping to buy gifts for each of her four kids. The woman left with bracelets and other small trinkets for only $18, and Leor felt that she had accomplished her goal, allowing shoppers with many different budgets to take home artworks.
“Dina is very fair,” said shop employee Alfred Estrella. “She’s always thinking about how to help the other person.”
Estrella says that Leor often donates items to schools and restaurants or for cultural events, asking only for a mention of the shop (that doesn’t always appear).
“She’s more of a giver than a taker,” he says.
Leor’s shop couldn’t possibly hold much more, but she does have a current favorite item: a six-inch sculpture of a woman holding a basket of flowers. In Oaxaca, an artisan friend’s daughter-in-law was making the piece while breastfeeding her baby, as the family’s white-haired grandmother stood in the doorway sanding another figurine. The techniques, passed down through generations, are what make the work special to Leor.
“You never lose being a part of the family, if you’re a part of their art,” she says.
Estrella, who has worked at the shop for three years, has seen Leor’s excitement when she receives a shipment from Mexico.
“Every time she opens a box she says it feels like Christmas,” he said. “She’ll tell me about where it came from and who made it.”
Leor plans to return to Mexico soon, bringing back works from some favorite artisans to help her expand her business into planning parties, featuring traditional Mexican food and music. She would like to help stage community events that encourage appreciation for folk art and Mexican traditions.
Until then, La Sirena has become her comfortable home in the East Village. She stands up, straightening her plum-colored embroidered blouse (“my uniform”) and greets a customer, pointing out one of her favorite new sculptures and launching into a story about the artist and the regional history of the piece.
When her employee enters, she can’t contain her excitement.
“Alfred,” she says, raising an engraved decorative mask. “Look at these new pieces I just got. Do you like them? Aren’t they cool?”
