It's a fifty-four year retrospective that is as eye-popping as it is anomalous. It leaves out the entire torso of Way’s career and leaps from the feet to the head, so to speak, from the early 1970s directly to now. And it leaves us to figure out how he’s gotten here. But the clues are everywhere, and what they reveal is how trust in a process can open up some very Big Ideas after all. What these paintings have in common through their different periods is their investigation of the intimate relations between chance and intention, control and surrender, color and structure, hand and mind, and even between bodily presence and absence. These are dichotomies we tend to take for granted, or even ignore, never asking whether they are opposed, how they might be reconciled, or what their actual relations are.

Sometime in the late 1960s, Jeff Way sprinkled pure acrylic pigment over a primed canvas and made a grid pattern with a chalk line. When he was satisfied, he fixed everything into place by spraying on medium. In one early example of the series, which he calls “eccentric squares,” the red lines are crisp and closely set, so that despite the blue and yellow notes and the rust-colored fog that envelops the whole, the piece bears a clear relationship to the Cartesian serenity of 1960s minimalism.

Onyedika Chuke (@onyedikachuke) is an artist, curator and gallerist behind New York City’s Storage Gallery and the apartment-turned-satellite gallery Storage APT (Art Presentation Template). The Nigerian-born artist began his career as an art dealer when he was studying sculpture at Cooper Union, under the mentorship of Susan Sheehan. Now, he continues breaking curatorial rules in an exciting way.

In a landscape where galleries often chase the illusion of effortless success, Onyedika Chuke is transparent about the failures and the sheer force of will required to do things differently. Creative consultant and cultural strategist Vajra Kingsley sat down with Chuke for Elephant. 

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.

At ninety-one, Gourevitch is among the last of the so-called New York School painters, the extraordinary group of artists who flourished from the forties through the early sixties. A motley crew of artists intent on reducing painting to its fundamental principles, she has continued on her own eclectic practice for over six decades. Her current show at Storage, which runs through July 2^nd, is a testament to this unique path. Though she has pursued a number of subjects throughout her long career, this show is dedicated to her most consistent subject from the seventies to the present, clouds.

For over six decades, the main subject for Gourevitch has been clouds. She has come to master the subject through a process of balancing the pursuit of pure abstraction against the pull of representational painting. Like Richard Diebenkorn, Gourevitch is an autobiographical painter—combining experience with tradition. Her paintings are idiosyncratic in a style that encompasses the intellect of John Constable, the romance of J.M.W. Turner, and the inventiveness of Diebenkorn.

 With the swipe of a huge brush, Jen DeLuna blurs her paintings before they can dry, freezing the image in a hazy moment. She describes the effect: “It’s like that feeling of memory fading, like something you can barely grasp.” Indeed, the works have a powerful feeling of uneasiness about them. Based on vintage found photographs, their combination of movement and stillness is inherently painterly.

In her debut solo exhibition, Olivia Springberg weaves together folklore, geometry, and mysticism into luminous paintings. Drawing from Jewish tradition, dream logic, and archaeological forms, her canvases—some fan-shaped, others menorah-like—resemble relics from rituals that never quite existed, yet somehow feel familiar.

In A New Sacred, on view at Storage, NYC (March 14th - May 3rd 2025), artists Eden Seifu (b. 1996) and Carolyn Oberst (b. 1946) stage a visual dialogue across generations, one that focuses on spirituality and the feminine divine. Through a charged entanglement of temporal rhythm and religious iconography, the exhibition lingers on the fragile boundary between the sacred and the secular, asking what forms of beauty and belief remain in times of ecological crisis. It seduces the viewer into imagining multiple ways of accounting for time’s passage and the world’s fragmented levity. 

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.

Porn’s golden age plays out across the walls of Storage APT — a bohemian art apartment on Bowery. Onyedika Chuke christened his Tribeca art space’s outpost in February with about a dozen photos from Barbara Nitke’s American Ecstasy series, captured on porn sets throughout the 1980s. Some prints are on paper, others on aluminum, lending a proper silver screen. But, even admiring collectors are shy, I learned, about living alongside explicit imagery. Storage APT, or “art presentation template,” as Chuke says, highlights how well Nitke’s sexy shots play in situ.

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.

Having visited “Then & Now: 1970–2024”, a selection of paintings by the artist Jeff Way, I was struck by the physicality present in the art and the exhibition. First, there is a palpable sense of history in the space. The gallery, Storage, sits a few stories above the crowd of cars and pedestrians that populate busy Walker Street in TriBeCa—which has experienced a renaissance as a hot spot in the New York art scene. Accessed by a tiny elevator, the loft space, is furnished with craftsman-like furniture, and creaking floors. It eschews the veneer of a white cube and provides an atmosphere that reminds a visitor that there was an important moment in art, pre-Chelsea, when this then moribund part of Manhattan became the gritty home to artists who would define the end of the twentieth century. The atmosphere of Storage is an authentic and physical reminder of this history, while Jeff Way is a direct artistic link to that past

A big chunk of booths at both New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) and the Untitled Art Fair had nearly sold-out by Wednesday afternoon.

Storage APT is a boutique art space adjunct to the main gallery tucked onto the Bowery. It is the ideal venue for Mr. Hobbs’s intimate, photorealistic drawings, small miracles of graphite legerdemain that evoke black and white photography as much as they do cinema.

Using almost every drawing and painting technique in artistry, Way is acclaimed for his chalk line grid paintings. He makes them with a carpenter’s chalk tool filled with powdered pigments. He then snaps the line across the canvas, creating nearly perfect grid lines with a do-it-yourself yardstick with nails. Much of this work, as well as his abstract pieces, are now on view at Storage at 52 Walker St. until October 5. Then & Now displays Way’s work from 1970 to 2024, showing the striking contrast of flatness and depth on his canvases.

Storage scores another bullseye with a double show of two young women painters, Susan Kim Alvarez and Jen DeLuna. It show cases two emerging talents that, despite their similarity in subject matter have vastly different approaches.

Last week in New York, Storage opened its latest exhibition titled “Then & Now: 1970–2024” by the local contemporary artist Jeff Way. On view through October 5, the solo presentation celebrates Way’s work over nearly seven decades, featuring historical and new paintings he’s made in his TriBeCa home and studio for over 50 years. Several included in the show are from Way’s “Eccentric Squares” series, which offers a new look at the distinct lines of grids through decentered squares.