One doesn’t expect a DIY project to look quite as perfect as Tribeca’s Storage gallery, but owner/director Onyedika Chuke is responsible for more than filling the space with art.

“I couldn’t get a loan for the renovation, so I did it myself,” he says. “I spent 20 hours a day on it. I could build a house if I needed to.”

The Nigerian-born artist began his career as an art dealer when he was still studying sculpture at Cooper Union, under the mentorship of Susan Sheehan.

“She was a smart, well-respected, astute business person,” Chuke recalls. “I learned a lot from her.”

After a stint as a professor at Cooper Union ended with the COVID lockdown, Chuke got serious about his first gallery, which also happened to be his living space on the Bowery. The move to 52 Walker St. was a leap, but Chuke was up to the challenge, both practically and philosophically.

Michiko Itatani’s exhibition here, “Cosmic Encounters,” presented ten large-scale oil paintings, completed between 2006 and 2023, featuring imagery the Japanese-born and longtime Chicago-based artist is known for, including majestic amphitheaters beneath nighttime skies, and richly decorated interiors of libraries, cathedrals, and concert halls. At the center of these spaces, positioned high up, were rings of luminescent orbs and chandeliers that had similar multicolored disks cascading from them. In most instances, an array of globes were placed around the rooms’ perimeters or encircle star charts laid into the floors. Architectural details—such as arches and Escher-like staircases, rendered with exaggerated perspectives—tempted the viewer to peer more deeply into the many recesses and passageways of these enigmatic scenes.

The egg tempera paintings by Kathryn Goshorn at Storage were modeled after the artist’s memories of her estranged father. Done in light gray hues, these paintings depict the lighting and subsequent disposal of cigars her dad smoked. They’re precious without being overly sentimental. Nearby them is a small photograph by Barbara Nitke, titled Bathroom Kiss, which captures two figures in lingerie and bondage equipment as they prepare to lock lips, and an Adam Lupton painting that represents a person in bed, staring at a phone. For that latter work, cut pieces of canvas and paint transferred from other works are cobbled together, causing the work to appear layered and dense.

Chuke conceived of Storage APT (Art Presentation Template) as a “deeply intimate, lesser commercial setting” and is running the space out of his own Bowery apartment. While apartment art spaces have a long history in urban centers, Chuke notes that, for him, “it’s a matter of creating a space that lets people get closest to the work and fosters community.”

While blue-chip galleries have certainly been flocking to Tribeca recently, experimental spaces, too, have been laying down roots. The most buzzed-about among this lot might be Storage, a space run by artist and dealer Onyedika Chuke, which has brought the work of artists such as Emory Douglas and Rick Lowe to new prominence. The artist-run space first opened in his Chinatown studio back in 2020 but moved to Walker Street in 2022. Born in Nigeria, Chuke grew up as a foster child in New York and has said he is drawn to works that speak to community-building and mutual aid because of those experiences. At last year's NADA Miami, the gallery made a critical impression with a presentation of works by artists Adam Lupton, Elizabeth Flood, and Baxter Koziol. It's currently running Chicago-based painter Michiko Itatani's New York solo debut in the Tribeca space.

The role of Storage is to read between the lines, to think before the making of the object, and to identify what is being missed as we consider objects as products. The audience has seen a vast variety of work through our ongoing rotating exhibition model called Press Release (2022-present), an international survey exhibition of overlooked artists. We're often asked, "What is your taste in art?" and our reply to inquirers is that we are interested in studio objects as opposed to market objects.

Our interest is to excite other artists and not the market. That very concept is born in the shared studios that I have been a part of over the course of twenty years of art making. As we consider artists for our exhibitions, I’ve never once sent the work to a collector to ask their opinion of the work before the exhibition. Our goal is solely to recalibrate the predominant New York historical framework.

Onyedika Chuke is one of Tribeca’s most promising up and coming gallerists. He has been previously featured and reviewed in Frieze, Artforum, Artnet the NY Times and the LA times. Born in Nigeria and raised in NY, he graduated from Cooper Union in 2011. Chuke came up in the art dealing world for fifteen years before striking out on his own towards the end of the pandemic. As the owner of STORAGE, tucked away on the fourth floor at 52 Walker Street, he has hand restored an old school gallery space that- in addition to bold new work- caters often to mid or late career artists with obscured histories. Chuke enjoys taking chances based on gut feelings and genuine love of work, a rarity in an increasingly market driven, blue-chip art world. We sat down with Chuke at STORAGE, which is currently showing the paintings of Michiko Itatani. They will also be at booth C-104 at the next NADA MIAMI, featuring Itatani, Jeff Way, Adam Lupton and Baxter Kozoi. We talked about his past, the mission of his gallery, art that matters, and the murky follies of the algorithmic and market driven art world.

What does heaven look like? The celestial interiors of Michiko Itatani, replete with earthly and otherworldly wonder, offer one possible glimpse. In Ms. Itatani’s solo New York debut at a new Tribeca gallery, Storage, her canvases imbue the entire space with their own peculiar brand of cosmic serenity.

At first glance, Ms. Itatani’s works appear to be faithful renditions of collective spaces, or spaces made for human gathering. They show cathedrals and temples, theaters, ballrooms and opera houses, concert halls, and grand libraries. There are sweeping staircases, large chandeliers, and box seats, shelves of books and scientific instruments, decorative ceilings, and tiled floors.

Only upon further examination does the metaphysical dimension of each interior reveal itself through a wealth of whimsical detail. Archways open directly onto deep space, portholes filled with stars appear in the floors and ceilings, luminous motes of stardust float everywhere, giving every painting an eerie glow.

THE LIMITS OF what commercial spaces were willing to take on was something that inspired the Nigerian-born artist Onyedika Chuke to also become a dealer. He is now the proprietor of Storage gallery in TriBeCa. Chuke started his career as a sculptor, he tells me, but found he kept running into the same problem. “I wasn’t making racially narrative sculpture.” Chuke, who arrived in the United States at 9, says, “I didn’t know I was Black until I came here.” He founded Storage in 2020 in the basement of a Chinatown restaurant. Though Storage is a commercial gallery, Chuke is attracted to art that is difficult to sell, for instance large sculptures by emerging artists or work that represents a shift in an established artist’s career. The first Storage show contained new works by Emory Douglas, the former minister of culture for the Black Panther Party, and paintings by Rick Lowe, better known for working with artists and nonprofit organizations to rehab dilapidated shotgun houses in Houston’s Third Ward. Chuke aspires to give artists the kind of creative freedom he lacked when he was up and coming. This is something bigger commercial galleries tend to shy away from, preferring that artists stick to their brand. “People want ketchup to always be red,” as he explains.

Last fall, in response to growing racial tensions and the coronavirus pandemic, artist Onyedika Chuke transformed his refurbished Bowery studio into the project space Storage. As a collaborative artist- and community-driven gallery, Storage highlights marginalized artists, prompting critical discourse around the makers and their work. Chuke has hosted a series of virtual conversations among artists, activists, scholars, and local residents, and is set to launch Application Readiness and Techniques, a mentorship that, beginning in September, will foster arts education, job readiness, and financial literacy for BIPOC teens and young adults.

It feels like I’m on a raft, and there are multiple hands creating a current in the water; they’re ushering me through,” Onyedika Chuke tells me. “That’s what turned this space into a gallery.” The space, which the artist built out himself, is a two-room basement in New York’s Chinatown called Storage Projects.

I visited the inaugural exhibition in the fall, after a summer of sickness and protest had left the city feeling both sapped and sharpened. During the shutdown, most galleries settled for online exhibitions, but some responded more directly to the protests. The Housing gallery, for example, held a and, from the window of its new space on the Lower East Side, screened a series of artists’ videos on social justice, including Howardena Pindell’s iconic Free, White, and 21 (1980).

When the social-practice conference Open Engagement came to New York in 2014, I remember being struck by how much vital work in reimagining art’s capacity for community involvement was happening elsewhere in the United States, and by how comparatively little of it was reflected in the city’s vaunted museums, venerable nonprofits, or myriad commercial galleries. That may now be changing. Two of the most influential figures in the field of social practice, Theaster Gates and Rick Lowe—the founders of the Rebuild Foundation in Chicago and Project Row Houses in Houston’s Third Ward, respectively—both made their Manhattan debuts last fall, albeit at markedly different scales. In Chelsea, Gates staged his first New York solo exhibition at Gagosian’s flagship space on West Twenty-Fourth Street. More modestly, but perhaps more consequentially, Lowe contributed a single painting to “Storage”, the inaugural group show for Storage, a new space started by artist Onyedika Chuke. The underscore in the exhibition’s title evoked the file names in inventory databases while also nodding to Storage’s “underground” location, in the basement of a building on the Bowery.

When artist Onyedika Chuke emerged from months of lockdown in New York City, there was one thing he felt he needed to do—and it wasn’t to see friends or to eat outdoors. It was to start a gallery.

He opened his space, called Storage, last month inside the basement art studio he’d been renting underneath a Korean restaurant on the Bowery. “It was a really run-down dusty space that I knew something magical could happen in,” Chuke told Artnet News.

The gallery—which opens at a moment when many other art businesses are facing financial challenges of historic proportions—aims to serve as an extension of Chuke’s artistic practice and activism. From the front end, it looks like a traditional commercial gallery, with a focus on work by women and people of color. But Chuke says he has embedded within it policies and practices that he hopes can model a more just art ecosystem.

Storage, he said, is “a gallery in form of a protest.”

The inaugural group show at this new project space, founded by the artist Onyedika Chuke in his own basement art studio, is a powerful mix of explicit politics and formal verve. Three of Emory Douglas’s graphic cover designs for the Black Panther newspaper remain as arresting as they were when he composed them 50 years ago. The Miami-based artist Yanira Collado contributes a spare, evocative sculpture reminiscent of a rooftop antenna, and a series of black-and-white photographs that document performances by Alicia Grullón are surprisingly striking in their own right. Two monumental works on paper — one, by William Cordova, a polymath of patterns, features a grayscale check pattern, and the other, by the Houston artist Rick Lowe, has a tidal wave of black marker lines on a golden yellow ground — are tacked directly to the walls, adding an extra burst of studio-visit excitement to an already energetic roundup.