Mira Dayal on Storage
Blau International
February 2021
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). – Mira Dayal