Press Release (Cycle XIII)

November 9th - December 21st, 2024

Storage
52 Walker Street
4th Floor
Tribeca, New York 10013

Storage is pleased to present Press Release (Cycle XIII), a group exhibition featuring the works of Rick Lowe (b. 1961), Leasho Johnson (b. 1984), Jeff Way (b. 1942), Hugo McCloud (b. 1980), Michael Igwe (b. 1994), and Carolyn Oberst (b. 1946). Blending abstraction and figuration, this exhibition brings together a diverse assemblage of voices that collectively explore the multifaceted nature of identity, culture, and social observation. Press Release (Cycle XIII) will be on view from November 9th, 2024 through December 21st, 2024 at Storage.

The works in Press Release (Cycle XIII) engage with personal and shared experiences, offering a rich tapestry of perspectives that reflect the complexities of contemporary identity. Each artist employs a unique take on narrative, social critique, and material exploration. 

Rick Lowe’s interdisciplinary practice maps the connections between culture and community, revealing how these elements influence and inform one another. In tandem, Hugo McCloud’s focus on materiality challenges viewers to consider the intersections of class, race, and identity through the lens of the environment and economy, emphasizing how our surroundings shape our experiences.

Michael Igwe’s storytelling, deeply rooted in folklore, offers a framework through which to explore personal and communal identities. In contrast, Leasho Johnson’s sharp commentary on post-colonial culture prompts critical reflections on the visible and invisible aspects of identity formation.

Carolyn Oberst balances lived experiences with imagined worlds, encouraging reflection on the boundaries between reality and perception. Meanwhile, Jeff Way’s exploration of shamanism and meditation introduces a spiritual perspective, inviting contemplation on the relationship between the personal and the collective.

Together the artists of Press Release (Cycle XIII) create a rich conversation that not only underscores the diversity of contemporary identity but also invites viewers to engage with the inevitable questions arising from their interconnected narratives. The shared contexts of these varied backgrounds reveal universal themes that transcend geographical boundaries, emphasizing the mutual human experiences that connect us all.

• Events

  Opening Reception
  Saturday, November 9th from 6-8pm

  Storage Tribeca
  52 Walker St, 4th Fl, New York, NY 10013

• Rick Lowe

  Rick Lowe (b. 1961) is a visual artist and community activist, known for his collaborative projects rooted in social justice. His practice combines painting, drawing, and installation with initiatives that engage communities in dialogue about equity and urban transformation. Lowe is the founder of Project Row Houses, a long-running cultural initiative in Houston’s Third Ward, which has served as a model for community-driven art projects nationwide. Lowe’s work has been exhibited in major institutions, including the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2014 and continues to teach at the University of Houston.

• Leasho Johnson

  Leasho Johnson (b.1984) is a visual artist working primarily in painting, installation and sculpture. He was born in Montego-Bay but raised in Sheffield, a small town on the outskirts of Negril Jamaica. His work reflects his experiences growing up as a Black, queer man within Jamaican Dancehall street culture. Johnson's art explores the intersection of identity, post-colonial narratives, and the black queer body, often blending painting and drawing to challenge stereotypes and cultural perceptions. His characters navigate the edges of visibility, aiming to disrupt historical and political expectations. Johnson’s work has been exhibited internationally, and he continues to expand his exploration of black mythologies and the autonomy of the black body in contemporary art.

• Jeff Way

  Jeff Way (b. 1942) has lived and worked in the Tribeca neighborhood of New York City since 1969. After his arrival in New York, Way was featured in the Whitney Museum of American Art at their 1973 Biennial curated by Marcia Tucker, and again the following year in a solo exhibition. Since then, Way’s work has been included in various exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Museum (Houston, TX), the New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York, NY), the Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia, PA), as well as other museums and galleries. Way’s works have been added to the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum through a gift by Larry Aldrich, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Denver Art Museum, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Cincinnati Art Museum.

• Hugo McCloud

  Hugo McCloud (b. 1980) is a self-taught artist whose practice blends industrial materials like plastic and roofing materials with traditional painting techniques. Through his work, McCloud addresses issues of labor, geopolitics, and the environment, transforming everyday materials into powerful visual statements. His recent work explores class and environmental impact, using thousands of plastic bags to create large-scale compositions. McCloud's work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and Fondazione 107, and his work is held in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. He lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

• Michael Igwe

  Michael Igwe (b. 1994, Lagos, Nigeria) works with painting. His work explores the fluidity of the human form and inner life. Drawing on his personal experiences and Nigerian heritage, Igwe’s paintings are a meditation on selfhood, often referencing the nonlinear storytelling tradition of "Iko-Nke Annang." His process emphasizes experimentation and primal gestures, allowing each piece to serve as a reflection on form, subjectivity, and transcendence. Igwe’s work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions across Africa, Europe, and the United States. He holds a BFA from the University of Benin and is currently pursuing an MFA at Columbia University School of the Arts. Igwe has been awarded several grants and fellowships, including The Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant and a fellowship at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

• Carolyn Oberst

  Carolyn Oberst (b. 1946) is a visual artist whose colorful work is influenced by the different, yet interconnected worlds around her. Whether it is the current, contemporary world, the world she creates for herself in her studio, or her internal world of dreams, intuitions, and memory, these aspects infuse her work. Oberst is an interdisciplinary artist, working across painting, drawing, mixed media, wood relief, and video animation. Currently, Oberst’s focus has returned to the directness of oil paint on canvas. Drawing is an important part of her process, as it provides the foundation from which her image making always begins.

• About Storage

  Storage is an artist-run gallery founded by Onyedika Chuke on the ideals of community, discovery, and connoisseurship. With locations in Tribeca and with a viewing room on the Bowery, Storage acts as an archive of makers that work in a range of materials and come from a wide demographic background. Half of the roster is dedicated to reinvigorating the careers of artists of historical prominence, while the other half focuses on nurturing rising artists. With a strong focus on art by women and people of color, Chuke guides Storage’s nontraditional approach to community building, commerce, and mutual aid. Furthermore, Storage hosts Application Readiness Technique (ART), a mentorship program for young artists and arts professionals.

NICK HOBBS

Out There Somewhere

October 18th - Extended through December 21st, 2024

Storage APT
On The Bowery
Please email info@storageartgallery.com for exhibition address

Storage APT is pleased to present Out There Somewhere, a solo exhibition by Nick Hobbs (b. 1997). The work in Out There Somewhere reflects on the relationship between terrestrial observers and the vast unknown. Heavily influenced by a lifetime of looking through telescopes as an amateur astronomer, Hobbs’ drawings capture the wonder and mystery of those experiences. Out There Somewhere will be on view from October 18th and is extended through December 21st, 2024, at Storage APT.

Hobbs’ intricate pencil drawings explore the blending of the familiar and the cosmic. These works draw inspiration from the telescopic gaze—where the gentle light of faraway stars and planets, like the fine marks of a pencil, accumulate to reveal the faint yet weighty images of the universe. With methodical care, layered strokes, and soft gradients, these drawings capture the tension between intimacy and vastness, inviting viewers into a meditative space that mimics the experience of stargazing.

Hobbs’ work embraces a slow and patient process, much like the way celestial objects often reveal themselves over time through research and curiosity. His dense layers of graphite on heavy watercolor paper create velvety surfaces rich in texture and depth, lending an almost metallic quality. The drawings’ delicate balance of smooth gradients and sharp contrasts emphasizes the relationship between scale and subject matter. The result is a body of work that feels at once familiar and otherworldly, grounded in the medium of drawing but reaching out toward the unknown.

Out There Somewhere invites viewers to contemplate their place in the cosmos and consider the delicate connections between the small and the infinite, the known and the unknowable. Out There Somewhere will open on Friday, October 18th, with a reception on Wednesday, October 23rd, from 6-8pm, at Storage APT. 

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Exhibition Review by David Hiroshi Jager

“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.”

“Some have distinctly whimsical subject matter, such as the legs and feet of a woman walking a whippet through a city. Another of a skyscraper in forced, nearly Bauhaus, perspective from below, by contrast, is practically formalist. They are disorienting in perspective, style, and approach, even with their apparently uniform patina of technical perfection.”

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Artist Q & A

Nick Hobbs (b. 1997) shares with Storage about his studio practice and current interests.

Storage: How does your background or personal experiences influence your art?
Nick Hobbs: Long before I thought of myself as an artist, I was an amateur astronomer. It kept me in a constant awareness of a cosmological context that’s easy to take for granted otherwise. It also taught me patience and instilled a love for dark and quiet. I still work primarily at night, it feels familiar from those years when I’d stay up all night with a telescope.

S: How do you know when a work is complete? What signals you that you are at your stopping point?
NH: Often I’m limited by the wear of the paper. Every pencil stroke wears down the tooth on the surface until eventually it becomes too dull and smooth to receive anymore graphite. I have to plan for that unavoidable deadline, which is good because I might pick at a drawing forever if I could.

• Events

  Opening Reception
  6-8pm
  Wednesday, October 23, 2024

  Please email info@storageartgallery.com to RSVP.

  Artist Hours
  2-6pm 
  November 13th, 16th, & 22nd 

  Please stop by our space on The Bowery to meet the artist and view the exhibition.

• About Nick Hobbs

  Nick Hobbs was born in 1997 in Shreveport, LA, and currently resides in New York, NY. He participated in the Undergraduate Residency Program at the New York Academy of Art (2018) and earned a BFA from Louisiana Tech University in Ruston, LA (2020). Hobbs received his MFA from the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, AR (2023). His work is heavily influenced by a lifetime of looking through telescopes as an amateur astronomer, with his intricate pencil drawings reflecting the wonder and mystery of the universe.
  

• About Storage APT

  Following Director Onyedika Chuke’s first two endeavors–Storage Projects Bowery (2020) and Storage Tribeca (2022)–Storage APT is conceived and renovated to serve as a deeply intimate, lesser-commercial, setting that highlights artists within the orbit of Storage Tribeca. Located three blocks from Cooper Union, Storage APT continues the strong tradition of cultural and conceptual inquiry that Chuke was immersed in during his time at the school. Storage APT is aimed at fostering a warm space where works are presented at a living, human scale and where community is cultivated through artist talks, dinners, and experimental projects.

JEFF WAY

Then & Now: 1970–2024

September 6th - Extended through November 2nd, 2024

Storage
52 Walker Street
4th Floor
Tribeca, New York 10013

Storage is pleased to present Then & Now: 1970–2024, a solo exhibition by Jeff Way (b. 1942). Then & Now: 1970–2024 traces the evolution of Jeff Way’s abstract work from the past to the present. Deeply focused on engagement with grid abstraction and spiritualism, Way distills qualities from West Coast and East Coast abstractionists alike. His work occupies a unique position alongside Agnes Martin, Mark Rothko, McArthur Binion, and Jack Whitten, who similarly share a profound connection to the exploration of geometric forms, grids, and their metaphysical implications.

Jeff Way has lived and worked in Tribeca, New York City, for over fifty years. He gained significant recognition in 1973 when Marcia Tucker selected his work for the Whitney Museum’s first official Biennial, which was followed by his solo exhibition at the museum in 1974. Way’s work Ivy’s Gas, gifted by Larry Aldrich, remains part of their permanent collection.

Now, Storage is pleased to feature Way’s new and historical works that illuminate duality and abstraction of the grid. The exhibition displays a striking contrast between flatness and depth in Way’s paintings and the processes he uses to achieve them. Way's abstract practice is deeply rooted in the grid, a motif he explored in the late 1960s, beginning with his Chalk Line Painting series. These early works are constructed using raw pigment snapped onto the canvas in single lines, layering to form dimensional shapes. This series reflects techniques he has honed, reducing painting to its most elemental form.

In his most recent series, Eccentric Squares, Way returns to his exploration of the grid but introduces newer elements that highlight a dynamic and unconventional approach. These paintings, composed again with his distinctive lines, use intersecting colors to create bold, de-centered squares. The result is an immediate dichotomy between the flatness of the surface and the depth of colors and forms within the constructed grid. Way likens his colored lines to musical notes—a fundamental unit of sensory communication—through which he creates harmony, dissonance, and rhythm.

Unlike the rigid, centered grids of his predecessors, Way’s grids are eccentric and fluid, offering a fresh perspective on abstract painting within the downtown New York art scene of the 1960s and beyond. By decentralizing the linear and geometric forms canonized by artists like Piet Mondrian and Sol Lewitt, Way’s work challenges conventional expectations and invites viewers to reconsider the role of grids in abstract compositions. His paintings emerge as living, breathing elements that carry the weight of decades of artistic research and experimentation.

Then & Now: 1970–2024 opens on September 6th and is extended through November 2nd, 2024. The exhibition is held at Storage, located on the fourth floor of 52 Walker Street, Tribeca, NY. This exhibition reaffirms Storage's mission to honor the legacies of intergenerational artists like Jeff Way, whose work continues to inspire and challenge the boundaries of contemporary art.

• Events

  Opening Reception
  6-8pm
  Friday, September 6th

  Storage Tribeca
  52 Walker St, 4th Fl, New York, NY 10013

• About Jeff Way

  Jeff Way (b. 1942) has lived and worked in the Tribeca neighborhood of New York City since 1969. After his arrival in New York, Way was featured in the Whitney Museum of American Art at their 1973 Biennial curated by Marcia Tucker, and again the following year in a solo exhibition. Since then, Way’s work has been included in various exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Museum (Houston, TX), the New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York, NY), the Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia, PA), as well as other museums and galleries. Way’s works have been added to the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum through a gift by Larry Aldrich, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Denver Art Museum, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Cincinnati Art Museum.
  

  Way began his Chalk Line Painting series in the late 1960s to explore the use of the grid through pigment and acrylic medium. These paintings are constructed using raw pigment snapped onto the canvas in single lines that layer together to form dimensional shapes. He returns to his use of the grid in his most recent series of paintings, Eccentric Squares. Composed again with his distinctive lines, Way uses intersecting color to create a sequence of bold, de-centered squares. The paintings present an immediate dichotomy between the flatness of the surface and the depth of colors and forms on the constructed grid.

Recent Exhibition Press

Lyle Rexer
September 27, 2024

Trust the process. Art’s a way of doing something, more than it is a way of saying something. And if it shows anything, it shows that way of doing something. There is a modesty in this that draws back from Big Ideas (and Big Emotions) and instead pursues provisional strategies: “What if I tried…” So an artist sets the terms, ships out, and lives to see where the process takes them. Best case, we go along for the ride. Jeff Way’s paintings at Storage show just how far that might lead.

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.

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Will Heinrich
September 19, 2024

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.

Soon, though, Way turned up the tension with louder colors and a more widely spaced grid that left room for discrete, Rorschach-like clouds of pigment in every cell. A few times he emphasized the gritty, unresolved texture of his process by working in white on white. Sometimes the pigment seems to float and disappear; occasionally he cast down colors so thickly that the grid was hardly visible.

More recently Way has been painting grids with a brush or drawing them with colored pencils. “Jeff Way: Then & Now (1970-2024),” down the block from his longtime TriBeCa studio at Storage Gallery, includes a number of bright, plaid-like drawings and paintings just as electric as the older work. Way goes over and over every surface until the tiny bits of white left exposed are practically shooting out into the gallery.

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Eliza Jordan
September 12, 2024

Last week in New York, Storage Gallery 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. 

Through his work reframing these squares, initially canonized by artists like Piet Mondrian and Sol Lewitt, Way’s work challenges expectations and visually encourages viewers to reconsider the role of grids in abstract arrangements. 

Organized by Storage’s Founder and Director, Onyedika Chuke, “Then & Now: 1970–2024” supports Storage’s ongoing mission to honor the legacies of intergenerational artists whose work inspires and challenges the boundaries of contemporary art. 

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Works by Jeff Way

SUSAN KIM ALVAREZ

Squonk, Squonky, Squonkalicious

Solo Debut Exhibition
August 2nd - August 30th, 2024

Storage
52 Walker Street
4th Floor
Tribeca, New York 10013

Storage is pleased to present artist Susan Kim Alvarez (b. 2000) in Squonk, Squonky, Squonkalicious, the artist’s New York Solo Debut exhibition. The exhibition is on view at Storage’s Tribeca location from August 2nd through August 30th, 2024.

Alvarez draws upon personal anecdotes to achieve intimacy in her works. Her process is carefully uncalculated, highlighting her attention to detail, color, and imagination. Inspired by her life, family, and community, Alvarez uses humor and chaos to explore identity. Her spontaneous and unapologetic acrylic washes weave through bold characters and fantastical scenes in quick motion, offering a candid glimpse into her personality.

• Events

  Opening Reception
  6-8pm
  Friday, August 2nd

  Storage Tribeca
  52 Walker St, 4th Fl, New York, NY 10013

• About Susan Kim Alvarez

  Susan Kim Alvarez (b. 2000, Hawaii) lives and works in Miami, FL. Alvarez is a multimedia artist whose practice explores the fantastical chaos of her innermost world. Her work has been shown in group exhibitions such as T&Y Projects + Art Intelligence Global, Tokyo, Japan; Bridge Red Studios, Miami, FL; NADA Miami Art Fair; and Rema Hort Mann Foundation, Manhattan. NY. Selected solo exhibitions include NSU Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale, FL and KDR305, Miami, FL. She is the recipient of numerous awards including Miami Individual Artists Grant, Ellies Award at Oolite Arts and named Polk Museum of Art Scholar. Alvarez is a graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art (2022) and The Skowhegan School Of Painting & Sculpture in Maine (2023).

JEN DELUNA

Dust and Sweat and Feigning Grace

Solo Debut Exhibition
August 2nd - August 30th, 2024

Storage
52 Walker Street
4th Floor
Tribeca, New York 10013

Storage is pleased to present artist Jen DeLuna (b. 1999) in Dust and Sweat and Feigning Grace, the artist’s Solo Debut exhibition. The exhibition is on view at Storage’s Tribeca location from August 2nd through August 30th, 2024.

DeLuna’s figurative works, inspired by family and found photographs, provide a spectral snapshot of the past. Her oil-painted subjects, wrapped in blurry hazes, feature moments that pierce the surface with captivating highlights. DeLuna crafts uncanny, notionally invasive moments that extend to the viewer through sharp gazes. With mystifying and alluring qualities, the works question their own viewership and explore the conditions of femininity.

• Events

  Opening Reception
  6-8pm
  Friday, August 2nd

  Storage Tribeca
  52 Walker St, 4th Fl, New York, NY 10013

• About Jen DeLuna

  Jen DeLuna (b. 1999) is a Filipino and Colombian-American painter currently based in Boston, MA. DeLuna’s work has been exhibited in exhibitions across the United States and internationally, including the Miller Institute for Contemporary Art, Pittsburgh, PA; IRL Gallery, Manhattan, NY; 81 Leonard Gallery, Manhattan, NY; CultureLab LIC, Queens, NY; Soft Times, San Francisco, CA and TsingHua University, Beijing, China. Selected awards include Scholarship Artist at Manhattan Graphic Center and School of Art Leadership Award. DeLuna holds a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University (2021).

ELIZABETH FLOOD

Lookout

April 19th - July 20th, 2024

Storage
52 Walker Street
4th Floor
Tribeca, New York 10013

Storage is excited to present Lookout, Elizabeth Flood’s debut solo exhibition in New York City. The show features a selection of oil paintings and ink drawings made in the last four years.

Flood's monumental multi-canvas oil paintings compile different vantage points and elevations around a particular site. Hiking out with her materials, Flood works on one canvas at a time, later joining them together in her studio. Each canvas is made at the same site, often over many months, accumulating layers of weather, seasonal shifts, and emotions.

• Events

  Artist Talk
  1:30-3:30pm
  Friday, May 3rd

  Storage
  52 Walker Street
  4th Floor
  Tribeca, New York 10013

  Join us for a conversation between Elizabeth Flood and Josephine Halvorson on ideas surrounding plein air landscape painting, working from observation, and expression in painting.

  Opening Reception
  6-8pm
  Friday, April 19th

• Press Release

  Taking place outdoors in the elements, Flood’s practice is physical and watchful. She excavates strata of emotion, history, and movement embedded in the landscape in her responsive, gestural approach. As an artist, Flood feels and processes the world around her, looking to cycles of trauma and endurance in the American Landscape through depictions of the Atlantic Ocean and dunes in Provincetown, Massachusetts; The Hudson River; Civil War Battlefields in Chancellorsville, Virginia and Gettysburg, Pennsylvania; and the Mojave Desert. These works span four years—a national election cycle—recording changes of weather, light, and topography through physical endurance and expression of painting.

  Lookout is an expression of warning, someone who keeps watch, and a place from which to see things coming. Flood’s work embodies these multiple definitions. She describes her practice as one of forecasting, communing, and vigilance. She looks to scars of impact and extraction embedded in the land to build resilience, and keep watch over a climate and country in crisis. For example, Battlefield (Chancellorsville, Summer), looks to traumas of war and loss buried in the soil, and to the persistent growth of surrounding plant life. Undulating ravines and trenches carve through the paintings’ relief-like surface. Flood looks to the land as collaborator and guide, incorporating grasses and sticks from the battlefield into the humid greens of the surrounding foliage. As a deeply divided America approaches another presidential election, weaponization of ideologies surrounding the Civil War is ever present. These paintings instead are a call to learn from what the land has witnessed, and watch out for danger on the horizon.

  Her monumental multi-canvas oil paintings compile different vantage points and elevations around a particular site. Hiking out with her materials, Flood works on one canvas at a time, later joining them together in her studio. Each canvas is made at the same site, often over many months, accumulating layers of weather, seasonal shifts, and emotions. Dunes, an immersive and atmospheric six canvas oil painting, charts the landscape’s changing terrain from February through July of 2023. Sweeping gestures of violet shadows echo the speed and violence of the wind. Airborn sand abrades the surface of the paintings, carving out a site of impact. Individually, each canvas is spatially logical, but as a whole, sky and ground, near and far become one in the same. Flood looks to Diego Rivera’s massive history frescoes, Joan Mitchell’s arboreal abstractions, and Sally Mann’s haunting photographs of the American South. Her cyclical compilations of canvases foreground a turbulent, experiential, and vital landscape.

  Single canvas “spiral paintings” pivot around a central locus, mapping cycles of erosion and burial, night and day, and life and death in the natural world. The topography and motion of the site dictate each vantage point’s gestural contours. As the time of day changes, the entire painting is rotated, and new horizons emerge. Nightwatch (Atlantic Ocean) weaves together phases of twilight, from dusk to dawn. Inky blacks and indigos smear with sandy grit. Wading her way through the disorienting dark, Flood grasps for beacons, searching for signals in the lights of passing boats and stars. Like the nearby lighthouses, which once kept watch for shipwrecks, these works keep vigil over a turbulent, vital, and vulnerable ocean—and the artist herself.

  In her black and white ink drawings, Flood traces the movement and terrain around her. These drawings are like cross sections of her embodied paintings, each a watchful representation of the landscape as it exists today. Collectively, the works in Lookout are spaces of communing, warning, and expression.

• About Elizabeth Flood

  Flood lives and works in Beacon, NY and is originally from Virginia. She earned her MFA in Painting from Boston University, her BA in History and Religious Studies from the University of Virginia, and studied at the Mt. Gretna School Of Art. In 2019, Flood was a participant at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and was an artist-in-residence at the Studios at MASS MoCA. She was awarded two Visual Arts Fellowships at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown in 2021 and 2022. Flood is the recipient of several grants and awards including the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant which helped fund this exhibition, the Real Art Award, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Graduate Fellowship, and the Boston University John Walker Alumni Award. She currently teaches painting at Purchase College.

BARBARA NITKE

American Ecstasy

Inaugural opening on February 14th, 2024

Storage APT
On The Bowery
Please email info@storageartgallery.com for exhibition address

Storage is pleased to announce a new project space, Storage APT (Art Presentation Template), unveiling on The Bowery on February 14th, 2024.

Storage APT invites Barbara Nitke (b. 1950), whose photographs elucidate a female gaze in the male-dominated adult film industry of the 80s in Downtown New York City. Inaugurating the space on Valentine’s Day, the exhibition reveals elegant and spiritual connections between adult actors, in color photographs taken in downtown New York of the 1980s.

• Events

  Please email info@storageartgallery.com to RSVP.

  Old School Slide Show
  Thursday, March 21st from 6-8pm

  Barbara Nitke presents an intimate slide show of images from her 1980s American Ecstasy photo series. She will be projecting the slides with a Kodak Carousel projector onto the walls of Storage APT.

  Porn Dinner
  Saturday, March 30th from 6-8pm

  Storage APT holds a special viewing of restored clips from the Golden Age of Porn with Casey Scott of Vinegar Syndrome, a company providing expert restoration and public distribution for hundreds of rare and forgotten cult films. Scott and artist Barbara Nitke discuss the movies compared to the photographs of the exhibition. A Porn Dinner of Soggy Baked Ziti Buffet follows the discussion.

  Porn Roundtable
  Thursday, April 4th from 6-8pm

  Please join us for an in depth conversation (live at Storage APT and hosted virtually on Zoom) about the value of pornography to society and what is lost when it is censored. Barbara Nitke is joined by Kirin Wachter-Grene, PhD in African American literature and gender and sexuality studies; Keren Moscovitch, PhD in visual arts and practicing artist; Alexis Heller, MA and curator specializing in LGBTQ issues; and Veronica Vera, DHS, former porn star and sexuality writer.

  View the Recorded Roundtable Here

  Porn Dessert
  Saturday, April 20th from 6-8pm

  Barbara Nitke presents a slideshow of images from American Ecstasy, offering a behind-the-scenes look at life on porn sets in New York City in the 1980s. This event follows up the Old School Slide Show, presented in March. Porn Dessert featuring Entenmann's Chocolate Covered Donuts will be served.

• About Barbara Nitke

  Barbara Nitke (b. 1950, Virginia) is a photographer whose focus spans from behind-the-scenes of hardcore porn sets to constructed narratives and portraiture. Nitke’s work is found in collections including the Kinsey Institute, IN; The New Hampshire Institute of Art, NH; Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki, Finland; Leather Archives and Museum, IN; Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, NY; and the Museum of Sex, NY. Nitke has been shown nationally and internationally. Selections of her work are collected in two monographs, Kiss of Fire: A Romantic View of Sadomasochism (introduction by A. D. Coleman) (2003) and American Ecstasy (introduction by Arthur C. Danto) (2012). Nitke is self taught in photography, having studied literature and philosophy at Baruch College, City University of New York. She has been on the faculty of School of Visual Arts since 1992.

Press Release (Cycle VIII)

March 16th - April 13th, 2024

Storage
52 Walker Street
4th Floor
Tribeca, New York 10013

Storage is pleased to announce Press Release (Cycle VIII), presenting artists Aristotle Forrester, Kathryn Goshorn, Louisa Owen, Marcus Leslie Singleton, Wen Liu, Sebastian Burger, Elizabeth Flood, and Michiko Itatani. This exhibition is held in extension of the gallery’s ongoing, rotational exhibition survey, Press Release (2022-present), featuring international and overlooked artists.

• Events

  Opening Reception
  6-8pm
  Friday, August 2nd

  Storage Tribeca
  52 Walker St, 4th Fl, New York, NY 10013

• Aristotle Forrester

  Aristotle Forrester explores personal narratives of loss, mythologies, and of the Black experience to ground his work within the expanding field of contemporary abstract painting. Extending lines of inquiry that originate in the modalities of mid-century artists including Willem de Kooning and Joan Mitchell, Forrester develops upon the idea of a figurative landscape with gestural, loaded brushstrokes to release an expressive quality upon his thick, luscious canvases.

• Kathryn Goshorn

  Kathryn Goshorn builds images in depiction of the human condition, the purpose of life and how behavior can affect its quality. Goshorn contemplates a duty to understand the space we take up and our influence as we move through the world and interact, leaving those echoes of action, or cause and effect, where the effect is irreparable and one is left to speculate about the cause.

• Louisa Owen

  Louisa Owen’s works posit paper as a membrane material, able to soak and absorb the atmosphere into itself. Reminiscent of the bodily forms and orifices found in Lee Bontecou’s wall sculptures or recent paper works by Lynda Benglis, Owens develops abstracted, organic structures simultaneously suggestive of a cave or a spinal column. Emphasizing durability and the architecture of such a frame in place to support the facilities of the body, Owen’s sculptures provide chambers and inlets for holding expressions of spirituality, meditation, loss, and stasis.

• Marcus Leslie Singleton

  Marcus Leslie Singleton is a Seattle born artist celebrated for his distinctive figurative paintings that deftly intertwine personal observations with broader societal themes. Singleton’s process demands a delicate balance of interpretation and recollection. Through natural, carefree, and playful brush strokes, his work offers meditations on broader issues of race, representation and the historical significance of everyday moments. Using spontaneity, scale, and expressive placement of color, Singleton’s paintings offer a jovial yet serious perspective that is both poignant and bold.

• Wen Liu

  Wen Liu’s sculptures address loss and abandonment through the modification and assembly of found materials. She uses reclaimed domestic objects to build up her sense of belonging and security. Sculptural reinvestment and temporal shift of traces from past to present imply narratives of absence and presence as well as alienation and comfort. Liu ‘s work balances between the contiuums of temporality and permanence, seeking to address the disparities between public recollection and private memory.

• Michiko Itatani

  Michiko Itatani (b. 1948, Osaka, Japan) is a Chicago-based painter. Itatani studied literature and philosophy in her youth before relocating to the US in the 1970's, where she studied visual art at the School of Art Institute of Chicago. She has received the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Marie Sharp Walsh New York Studio Grant and the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship among others. She was selected by the Women’s Caucus for a Lifetime Achievement Award 2020.

MICHIKO ITATANI

Cosmic Encounters

October 27th, 2023 - Extended through January 19th, 2024

Storage
52 Walker Street
4th Floor
Tribeca, New York 10013

Storage is pleased to announce Cosmic Encounters, a monumental collection of complex, medium and large-scale paintings by the inimitable, Chicago-based painter Michiko Itatani (b. 1948, Osaka, Japan). An established Chicago arts icon, Itatani's impact is preceded by her history of artistic, philosophical, and community-driven accomplishments. Itatani’s oeuvre is long-established by her transcendent tendency for painterly techniques and symbolism. In this exhibition at Storage, Itatani’s range of work offers a dream-bound iconography of figurative and symbolic objects from the greatest extents of human curiosity. The first solo exhibition at Storage within our inaugural, ongoing exhibition series titled Press Release, Cosmic Encounters is also Itatani’s first solo exhibition in New York City after 30+ years.

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• Events

  Opening Reception
  6-8pm
  Friday, October 27th

  Storage Tribeca
  52 Walker St, 4th Fl, New York, NY 10013

• About Michiko Itatani

  Michiko Itatani (b. 1948, Osaka, Japan) is a Chicago-based painter. Itatani studied literature and philosophy in her youth before relocating to the US in the 1970's, where she studied visual art at the School of Art Institute of Chicago. She has shown paintings and installation work in a great range of exhibitions since 1973, and remains active as a prolific artist and professor emeritus at the Painting and Drawing department at the SAIC since 1979. Itatani currently lives and works in Chicago, IL.

  Michiko Itatani's work has been shown in more than 100 one-person and group exhibitions locally, nationally, and internationally. The largest of these exhibitions were at Rockford Art Museum, Illinois (1987); Musée du Quebec, Canada, (1988); Chicago Cultural Center (1992); Tokoha Museum, Shizuoka, Japan (1998); Frauen Museum, Bonn, Germany(2000); University of Wyoming Art Museum (2022-3), Wrightwood 659, IL (2022-3). Museum and institutional collections include the Olympic Museum, Lausanne, Switzerland; Museu D’art Contemporani (MACBA), Barcelona, Spain; Yamanouchi Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd., Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; and many more.

  Itatani has received the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Marie Sharp Walsh New York Studio Grant and the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship among others. She was selected by the Women’s Caucus for a Lifetime Achievement Award 2020.

Press Release (Cycle VI)

September 27th - October 18th, 2023

Storage
52 Walker Street
4th Floor
Tribeca, New York 10013

On this occasion, we celebrate the ambitious, communal, and build-it-yourself nature of the founding of Storage with Press Release (Cycle VI), a presentation by Jeff Way (b. 1942) and Carolyn Oberst (b. 1946), two Tribeca-based artists who share a similar ethos.

In Press Release (Cycle VI), archival and recent works by Jeff Way and Carolyn Oberst are curated to examine modalities of labor and transcendence within the historical canon of painting. The exhibition also explores 50+ years of camaraderie between Oberst and Way, who have cohabited in their Walker St loft since the 1970s, but have found disparate modes of artistic exploration.  Similar in the practices of Oberst and Way are references to a blue-collar ideology of making, as they both experiment with the notion of the ‘frame’. Oberst restores discarded frames before painting in and on them, while Way utilizes the explosive gesture of a chalk line tool, often found in carpenters’ work boxes. 

Press Release (Cycle VI) demonstrates Storage’s commitment to centering archival and contemporary works by intergenerational artists pushing the boundaries of artistic traditions. As we celebrate one year since our gallery's opening at 52 Walker St. in September 2022, Storage has held an ongoing, inaugural survey exhibition called Press Release with an organic rotation of artworks. 

• Events

  Opening Reception
  6-8pm
  Friday, September 27th

  Artists Talk
  6-8pm
  Wednesday, October 11th

  Tribeca-based artists Jeff Way (b. 1942) and Carolyn Oberst (b. 1946) led by Charlotte Meyer, Director of the Rema Hort Mann Foundation will be discussing the history of Downtown New York art scene 1960’s-2000’s. Notions of space making, economics, and intellectual movements would be explored as we celebrate our 1-Year Anniversary in Tribeca.

• Jeff Way

  Jeff Way (b. 1942) has lived and worked in the Tribeca neighborhood of New York City since 1969. After his arrival in New York, Way was featured in the Whitney Museum of American Art at their 1973 Biennial curated by Marcia Tucker, and again the following year in a solo exhibition. Since then, Way’s work has been included in various exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Museum (Houston, TX), the New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York, NY), the Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia, PA), as well as other museums and galleries. Way’s works have been added to the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum through a gift by Larry Aldrich, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Denver Art Museum, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Cincinnati Art Museum.

  Way began his Chalk Line Painting series in the late 1960s to explore the use of the grid through pigment and acrylic medium. These paintings are constructed using raw pigment snapped onto the canvas in single lines that layer together to form dimensional shapes. He returns to his use of the grid in his most recent series of paintings, Eccentric Squares. Composed again with his distinctive lines, Way uses intersecting color to create a sequence of bold, de-centered squares. The paintings present an immediate dichotomy between the flatness of the surface and the depth of colors and forms on the constructed grid.

• Carolyn Oberst

  Carolyn Oberst (b. 1946) is a visual artist whose colorful work is influenced by the different, yet interconnected worlds around her. Whether it is the current, contemporary world, the world she creates for herself in her studio, or her internal world of dreams, intuitions, and memory, these aspects infuse her work. Oberst is an interdisciplinary artist, working across painting, drawing, mixed media, wood relief, and video animation. Currently, Oberst’s focus has returned to the directness of oil paint on canvas. Drawing is an important part of her process, as it provides the foundation from which her image making always begins.

Press Release (Cycle V)

July 28th - August 12th, 2023

Storage
52 Walker Street
4th Floor
Tribeca, New York 10013

Storage’s inaugural exhibition series, Press Release, that began in September 2022 continues with the opening of Press Release (Cycle V), featuring the work of Columbia MFA Students - Candela Bado, Garrett Ball, Kevin Cobb, Conor Dowdle, Nick Farhi, Amadeo Morelos Favela, Aristotle Forrester, Valeria Guillén, Ian Ha, Jing Harren, Char Jeré, Roxana Kadyrova, Calvin Kim, Kristian Kragelund, Sangmin Lee, Meaghan Elyse Lueck, Anna Ting Möller, Kai Oh, Paul Rho, Robbie Rogers, Benjamin Salesse, Albert Samreth, Sof'ya Shpurova, Motohiro Takeda, Vivian Vivas, Ming Wang, Shuai Yang, and Julian Zehnder.

Curated by Storage founder, director and Columbia University professor, Onyedika Chuke, Press Release (Cycle V) presents a collaboration with current students and recent graduates of the Columbia MFA Fine Arts program. In a rotating cycle of paintings, sculptures, performances and installations, we examine the works of these emerging artists and their explorations of time and space through their media. As a whole, the show Press Release investigates the ephemeral notions of “pressure” and “release” - the pieces by these selected Columbia MFA students are examples of how a new vanguard of artists choose to enhance and alter the way one moves through a gallery.

After taking the elevator/gallery from the street of 52 Walker, visitors enter our 4th floor gallery space through a portal of wallpaper designed and installed by Garrett Ball, whose intricately repeating black and white vistas immediately envelop us in discourse on space, power, and class. This wallpaper is installed further in the gallery, where other paintings and sculptures echo its themes in ways ranging from intimate to grandiose.

• Events

  Opening Reception: Part I
  6-8pm
  Friday, July 28th, 2023

  Opening Reception: Part II
  Wednesday, August 16th, 2023

Press Release (Cycle IV)

June 24th - July 19th, 2023

Storage
52 Walker Street
4th Floor
Tribeca, New York 10013

Storage’s inaugural survey exhibition began in September 2022 and continues with a reception of a new group of artists: Raphaela Melsohn, Baxter Koziol, Angela Dufresne, Jeff Way, Carolyn Oberst, Pol Morton and Adam Lupton.

Press Release presents an evolving conversation between artworks that examine notions of pressure and release. In Press Release (Cycle IV), we continue to question relations between bodies and space, reimagining them as symbiotic through artistic processes that are not commercially mainstream.

Visitors enter our 4th floor gallery space from the street at 52 Walker through an elevator/gallery space that disrupts notions of an interior/exterior static duality. Inside, they are greeted by an angular 4,90 x 4,90 x 3,70 aluminum structure nested on a hand loomed carpet whose shifting dimensions create spaces that are, in turn, influenced by the trace of visitors. Surrounding paintings further advance our conversation by investigating the body’s relation to the context around it, or by abstracting space altogether.

• Events

  Opening Reception
  6-8pm
  Saturday, June 24th

Press Release (Cycle III)

April 21st - June 22nd, 2023

Storage
52 Walker Street
4th Floor
Tribeca, New York 10013

Storage’s inaugural survey exhibition began in September 2022 & continues with Press Release (Cycle III), a reception for an incoming group of artists: Angela Dufresne, Baxter Koziol, Adam Lupton, Pol Morton, Brandon Morris, Carolyn Oberst, Louisa Owen, & Jeff Way.

The exhibition exists as an ongoing essay where works are used to reposition and examine notions of pressure & release. For Press Release (Cycle III), we challenge perceptions of the body and space through painting, sculpture & performance.

Some works presented explore historically normative notions of physical space. Other works play on aspects of queer space through edits on museological tropes. The artists investigate the beauty, fragility, and resilience of the body, considering the space within and around it. They make mundane spaces alienating by accommodating the body's architecture and they rework exterior space, extending the traditions of the trompe-l'œil garden and abstracting our surrounding landscape within the gallery.

• Events

  Opening Reception
  6-8pm
  Friday, April 21st

Press Release (Cycle II)

February 3rd - April 19th, 2023

Storage
52 Walker Street
4th Floor
Tribeca, New York 10013

Storage’s inaugural survey exhibition began in September 2022 & continues with a reception for a new group of artists Angela Dufresne, Adam Lupton, Baxter Koziol, Eli Ping, Jeff Way, Louisa Owen, and Brandon Morris. Followed by cycled in works by Paul Thek, Jason Gringler, Howardena Pindell, Sebastian Burger, Tauba Auerbach, Al Loving, and Senga Nengudi.

The rotational group exhibition unfolds over time, adding works through a curated model. This iteration of the exhibition presents explorations of the body in protest, violence, loving acts, & camaraderie–all the while considering programming that explores notions of power & the suppression of words.

The absence of the body is central in activating the performativity of the works, giving attention to tangible reverberations of the artists’ practices. In the exhibition, physical qualities of the works may allude to the precarious circumstance of creating a body using obscure language. This language is one that allows emotions to exist within the realm of non-empirical standards, pushing the limit of existence.

• Events

  Opening Reception
  6-8pm
  Friday, February 3rd

Press Release (Cycle I)

September 9th, 2022 - February 1st, 2023

Storage
52 Walker Street
4th Floor
Tribeca, New York 10013

Press Release, the inaugural exhibition at our new 52 Walker Street location explores how feelings of pressure and tension –be they physical, social, or emotional– have become unsustainable and what new dimensions of release –in protest, in violence, in loving acts, and mutual care– have been created in response to the relationship between the power of pressure and the pressure of media and art production at large.

Historically, we traced the term “press” as a metonym for the media following the invention of the printing press, recalling its modern power with two of its actions and their implicit authority: Press as the embedded physicality in the act of pressing, and Release as containing an implicated response of resistance to applied pressure.

Storage will have an "Open Studio" model for group exhibitions, allowing shows to evolve and exhibit works by incoming artists on a rotating basis during the duration of each presentation. Press Release opens with works by Nate Lewis, Elizabeth Flood, Morgan Canavan, Sula Bermúdez-Silverman, Carlos Martiel, Lyndon Barrois Jr. Followed by cycled-in works by Paul Thek, Edwin Klein, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Elizabeth Catlett, Howardena Pindell, Kenny Rivero, Al Loving, Olivia Erlanger, William Pope L, Eli Ping, Fin Simonetti, Lyle Ashton Harris, Kim Hoeckele, and more.

• Events

  Opening Reception
  6-8pm
  Friday, September 9th, 2022