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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

Jen DeLuna paints vintage, nude photographs of women in a new light. Her debut solo exhibition at Storage in New York positions the artist as one to watch.

Elizabeth Flood’s landscapes in “Lookout” at Storage Gallery include oil paintings that emphasize realism and expressionistic ink drawings. The latter express vigorous engagement with the outdoors. Gettysburg (Pickett’s Charge, October 9) channels the drama of that day. Stirring energy like that of George Nick’s alla prima work drives the eye deep into a field under a sensational sky. Conversely, mental distance accompanies Flood’s large polyptychs, whose combinations resemble photographic contact sheets, art website layouts, or bulletin board accruals. At their best, artifice is imbued with the existential doubt of Edwin Dickinson or Giacometti. Repetition and variance become metaphors for modern contingency and ambivalence. Multiple views rouse a mix of ennui, curiosity, taste, and choice, like that fueling our daily shuffle through cyberspace.

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.

Ms. Flood’s painting approach is not only rooted in a deep knowledge of the genre, but is also rooted in the immediacy of perception. She thinks nothing of hiking for hours to find the right spot, in all types of weather, and this can be felt in the fresh immediacy of each one. Ms. Flood is one of the few landscape painters that refuses to work from photographs, insisting, like Cezanne, on the benefits of painting outdoors, en plein air. 

One doesn’t expect a DIY project to look quite as perfect as Tribeca’s Storage gallery, but owner/director Onyedika Chuke is responsible for more than filling the space with art.

“I couldn’t get a loan for the renovation, so I did it myself,” he says. “I spent 20 hours a day on it. I could build a house if I needed to.”

The Nigerian-born artist began his career as an art dealer when he was still studying sculpture at Cooper Union, under the mentorship of Susan Sheehan.

“She was a smart, well-respected, astute business person,” Chuke recalls. “I learned a lot from her.”

After a stint as a professor at Cooper Union ended with the COVID lockdown, Chuke got serious about his first gallery, which also happened to be his living space on the Bowery. The move to 52 Walker St. was a leap, but Chuke was up to the challenge, both practically and philosophically.

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.

The egg tempera paintings by Kathryn Goshorn at Storage were modeled after the artist’s memories of her estranged father. Done in light gray hues, these paintings depict the lighting and subsequent disposal of cigars her dad smoked. They’re precious without being overly sentimental. Nearby them is a small photograph by Barbara Nitke, titled Bathroom Kiss, which captures two figures in lingerie and bondage equipment as they prepare to lock lips, and an Adam Lupton painting that represents a person in bed, staring at a phone. For that latter work, cut pieces of canvas and paint transferred from other works are cobbled together, causing the work to appear layered and dense.

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.

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.

Onyedika Chuke is one of Tribeca’s most promising up and coming gallerists. He has been previously featured and reviewed in Frieze, Artforum, Artnet the NY Times and the LA times. Born in Nigeria and raised in NY, he graduated from Cooper Union in 2011. Chuke came up in the art dealing world for fifteen years before striking out on his own towards the end of the pandemic. As the owner of STORAGE, tucked away on the fourth floor at 52 Walker Street, he has hand restored an old school gallery space that- in addition to bold new work- caters often to mid or late career artists with obscured histories. Chuke enjoys taking chances based on gut feelings and genuine love of work, a rarity in an increasingly market driven, blue-chip art world. We sat down with Chuke at STORAGE, which is currently showing the paintings of Michiko Itatani. They will also be at booth C-104 at the next NADA MIAMI, featuring Itatani, Jeff Way, Adam Lupton and Baxter Kozoi. We talked about his past, the mission of his gallery, art that matters, and the murky follies of the algorithmic and market driven art world.

What does heaven look like? The celestial interiors of Michiko Itatani, replete with earthly and otherworldly wonder, offer one possible glimpse. In Ms. Itatani’s solo New York debut at a new Tribeca gallery, Storage, her canvases imbue the entire space with their own peculiar brand of cosmic serenity.

At first glance, Ms. Itatani’s works appear to be faithful renditions of collective spaces, or spaces made for human gathering. They show cathedrals and temples, theaters, ballrooms and opera houses, concert halls, and grand libraries. There are sweeping staircases, large chandeliers, and box seats, shelves of books and scientific instruments, decorative ceilings, and tiled floors.

Only upon further examination does the metaphysical dimension of each interior reveal itself through a wealth of whimsical detail. Archways open directly onto deep space, portholes filled with stars appear in the floors and ceilings, luminous motes of stardust float everywhere, giving every painting an eerie glow.

THE LIMITS OF what commercial spaces were willing to take on was something that inspired the Nigerian-born artist Onyedika Chuke to also become a dealer. He is now the proprietor of Storage gallery in TriBeCa. Chuke started his career as a sculptor, he tells me, but found he kept running into the same problem. “I wasn’t making racially narrative sculpture.” Chuke, who arrived in the United States at 9, says, “I didn’t know I was Black until I came here.” He founded Storage in 2020 in the basement of a Chinatown restaurant. Though Storage is a commercial gallery, Chuke is attracted to art that is difficult to sell, for instance large sculptures by emerging artists or work that represents a shift in an established artist’s career. The first Storage show contained new works by Emory Douglas, the former minister of culture for the Black Panther Party, and paintings by Rick Lowe, better known for working with artists and nonprofit organizations to rehab dilapidated shotgun houses in Houston’s Third Ward. Chuke aspires to give artists the kind of creative freedom he lacked when he was up and coming. This is something bigger commercial galleries tend to shy away from, preferring that artists stick to their brand. “People want ketchup to always be red,” as he explains.

Last fall, in response to growing racial tensions and the coronavirus pandemic, artist Onyedika Chuke transformed his refurbished Bowery studio into the project space Storage. As a collaborative artist- and community-driven gallery, Storage highlights marginalized artists, prompting critical discourse around the makers and their work. Chuke has hosted a series of virtual conversations among artists, activists, scholars, and local residents, and is set to launch Application Readiness and Techniques, a mentorship that, beginning in September, will foster arts education, job readiness, and financial literacy for BIPOC teens and young adults.