Sarah Cascone on Storage
Artnet
October 15, 2020
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.” – Sarah Cascone