Widewalls: Rethinking the Archive – In Conversation with Onyedika Chuke
Interviews
Detecting the gaps within art history and the broader system of art, Onyedika Chuke, a Nigerian-American artist, art dealer, curator, and gallerist, has been navigating the art world with an intense devotion to finding alternative modes of expression, production, presentation, and circulation of art. First drawn to the concept of an archive in his ten-year-long project, the Forever Museum Archive, reexamining the processes of collecting, organizing, and generating narratives through objects, Chuke, who is also an adjunct professor at Columbia University, founded Storage in 2020 as an extension of rethinking preexisting societal and artistic structures.
Sprouting in the artist's refurbished studio, an underground basement, on the Bowery, Storage emerged during the aftermath of the COVID-19 lockdown and Black Lives Matter protests as an act to reclaim, or rather, take control over the narrative guided by the strong hand of the art market. Fusing Chuke's previous educational, commercial, and activist experiences, Storage presents a unique model of artists' self-organization that does not operate from an oppositional perspective but instead takes an alternative position to a market-driven one.
Relocated to the historic 52 Walker Street Building in Tribeca, Storage focuses on the notion of revival, spotlighting the work of emerging, mid-career, and established artists. Titled Press Release, their exhibition model featured several group or solo shows, or Cycles, in 2023, and the year concludes with Cosmic Encounters, Michiko Itatani's first solo presentation in New York City.
We had a conversation with Onyedika Chuke to learn more about this groundbreaking gallery. In an exclusive Widewalls interview, the artist reflected on the motivations behind the idea, discussed the program’s intentions, his artistic practice, curatorial approach, and much more.
Michiko Itatani – Cosmic Encounters, Storage, 2023. Courtesy of the Artist and Storage.
Recalibrating the Framework
Widewalls: Following the COVID lockdown experience, you founded Storage in 2020 as a reactionary expression. Could you tell us more about the motivations, feelings, and intentions behind the idea?
Onyedika Chuke: I believe that my entry into the art world is unique in that I started with grassroots activism and educational programs in inner-city New York. During the lockdown and the protests, I was quite active, and as the protests started to wane, I felt that I might be able to use skill sets that I garnered through art making, time spent in pedagogy, and working at a gallery (since 2007), towards a form of mutual aid that could be made digestible under the moniker of a gallery. That idea became what was called Storage Projects, which opened in April 2020 in my former art studio on the Bowery and closed in February 2021.
Widewalls: The power of words as self-determinants becomes especially evident in the gallery's name, implying a physical place to select, collect, arrange, and organize. What is the concept within the name, and how does it determine the vision of the space itself?
OC: Storage speaks to the concept of entering into history and pulling things out of the archive to create a context for the contemporary audience. Half of our artists are over the age of seventy, and the other half are younger than forty, not by design but by the caliber of their works. By reinvigorating older artists' careers and, secondly, creating in-depth, curatorial-driven, context-based exhibitions that work against the collectors’ impulse to buy and put works directly into storage, we're working against "storage" at the same time.
Widewalls: As an artist-run space, Storage converges upon the notion of self-organization, implying a counter-institutional position or one that is situated beyond its framework. How would you describe the role of Storage within the broader art system?
OC: 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.
Michiko Itatani – Untitled painting from Rainmaker 06-B-04(RM-2), 2006. Courtesy of the Artist and Storage.
Press Release
Widewalls: Inspired by a quote from Afro-Caribbean poet and politician Aimé Césaire's Discourse on Colonialism: "It is not a dead society that we want to revive. We leave that to those who go in for exoticism," the inaugural show guided the trajectory for the gallery. How has this initial stance determined and informed the gallery's program?
OC: The first exhibition was at what was then Storage Projects. It was titled storage_, marking a space in an internet-based archive. Written in lowercase, the title alluded to the initial space the gallery was located in an underground basement that I renovated myself. What I did in that first exhibition at Storage Projects is what I wanted to do in a longer, open-script exhibition.
At our new space in Tribeca that I also personally renovated, the concept of reawakening gave rise to our Press Release exhibition model, which is pneumatically based on the ideas of pressure and points of release but also borrows from the "press release" as a well-known art publication announcement. In the former definition of pressure, it is what I believe the world is constantly under. The release, as exercised by one that is under pressure, can either be accepted as pleasurable by the audience (they receive accolades) or it can be accepted as abject (acts of violence, protests, etc). This series of revivals is a way of pointing to agency, activism, and the remaking of a collective image archive.
Widewalls: After four years in the making, the current display featuring works by Michiko Itatani concludes the year at Storage, marking the first solo exhibition at the gallery and the artist’s first solo presentation in New York City. Could you tell us more about this collaboration and the exhibition?
OC: The process for this exhibition has evolved since I was first introduced to Michiko four years ago. Things started to look promising as I spoke to the artist on the phone earlier this March. Michiko stated that one of the largest exhibitions of her work was on view at the University Museum of Wyoming, adding at the end of our call that "you would not be able to see it because the exhibition closes in four days and Wyoming is not an easy place to travel to." I replied to her, "I will be there." Not being able to get a direct flight to Wyoming, I landed in Denver, rented a car, and drove to Wyoming to meet the artist for the first time and to be amongst her work. Something felt very correct in a way, in that she had everything we enjoy in the artists we work with, a perspective that was unique in her generation, a way of working that was canonically challenging to the history of painting, and that she was greatly overlooked. Michiko herself saw something in the gallery, noticing that we are very hands-on, mission-driven, and ambitious.
When I opened the exhibition in October and walked Michiko through my curation of her work, it felt amazing that we were celebrating not just her but all the students who came through her mentorship during her 45 years of teaching at SAIC. Since the exhibition opened, the gallery has become a point of pilgrimage for her friends and students who have always seen her greatness but have often been baffled that other people haven't shown her.
This exhibition features works from Itatani's last two retrospectives at Wrightwood 659 in Chicago and at the University Museum of Wyoming, while placing focus on the latest sixteen years of the artist's production. Working with older artists, I like to begin with their most recent works as a way to celebrate their innovation and often still vivid practice.
Portait of Onyedika Chuke. Photo: Michael Avedon. Courtesy of Storage.
The Artist as Archivist
Widewalls: In a sense, your artistic practice conflates with your gallerist role, epitomized in the role of an archivist. What similarities and differences would you point out as defining within these various roles? What artistic projects would you single out as particularly meaningful for that process?
OC: In my own work, I began a project called the Forever Museum archive in 2011. Akin to Jorge Luis Borges' "The Library of Babel," in which he speaks of a library containing all of human knowledge, in my own artistic project, I am the archivist, the fabricator, the curator, and the administrator of a physical and digital archive. In that space, I make objects myself and then curate an exhibit of the objects in non-commercial spaces.
Over the course of ten years of that project, I did not offer any of the objects for sale, as I placed a moratorium on the archive at the very beginning. Storage as a gallery does the same thing, except it is trying to make an account of what was lost in art history, which in many ways is driven by commerce. Therefore, though we consider the curatorial context first, the gallery's commercial arm is necessary. We would not have the works of Pablo Picasso or Louise Bourgeois without their gallerists and art dealers.
Widewalls: As a Columbia University professor, you have also opened Storage as a gallery space for student projects. How has this experience within academia transformed and informed your mission?
OC: My career in the arts began over twenty years ago. In 2007, I began art school and coincidentally started to deal art. I started teaching at non profit programs and eventually became involved in foster care mentorship, as well. Storage is born out of this multifaceted background, influenced by my own studio practice, pedagogy, activism, and commerce. So, it was natural to offer a course on art and business at Columbia, based on a first-person account of the art world from the unique combined perspective of an artist, dealer, and educator. Storage continues to branch out with its educational mission, supporting students from the likes of Hunter University and tour groups from New York public schools.
Widewalls: What's next for you and Storage?
OC: We are excited to travel to Miami this December for our upcoming booth at the NADA Art Fair. Our showcase includes Adam Lupton, Baxter Koziol, and Michiko Itatani. Lupton and Koziol have been in Storage's Press Release group exhibition series since the space's inception in September 2022, and their presentation in Storage's debut art fair precipitates solo exhibitions with the gallery in the spring of 2024 and 2025, respectively.
Next year will see a packed schedule of solo exhibitions on top of our showcase at the Felix Art Fair in Los Angeles and a reveal of our new viewing room space on the Bowery.