Edition Modern Luxury: Art Sanctuary
By Bianca Gracie
Onyedika Chuke (@onyedikachuke) is an artist, curator and gallerist behind New York City’s Storage Gallery and the apartment-turned-satellite gallery Storage APT (Art Presentation Template). The Nigerian-born artist began his career as an art dealer when he was studying sculpture at Cooper Union, under the mentorship of Susan Sheehan. Now, he continues breaking curatorial rules in an exciting way.
Do you have any artistic memories from your childhood?
So, the gallery, in many ways, is the biography of my life. I started in Nigeria. I’m the youngest of four kids and the only boy in my family. That’s how I started making art. My mom, I don’t think she necessarily knew how to raise someone like me, so she put
me in the backyard. [In the Onitsha] region of Nigeria, there’s terra cotta on the earth; it’s packed red clay. So I used to just dig up the earth and make stuff. I would design cities top down, and it didn’t make sense to me until about a year ago. All of my projects as an artist were made from a bird’s-eye view.
I didn’t have a lot of the support that most galleries would have starting off. But that also allowed me to create a system that I can really understand, which is to demolish your gallery and rebuild it the way you needed to build it. By making art early, I figured out that it was a way of making contact with history and people who came before me. When I founded the gallery, I thought I’d be more autonomous as a dealer, as opposed to being an artist. That ended up not being true. There’s even more collaboration as an art dealer than you would [have] as an artist.
How do you provide resources to rising artists with your nonprofit, A R T.?
A.R.T. stands for application, readiness and techniques. It was a project that was birthed on Rikers Island when I was doing research between 2018 and 2019. I worked in foster care for a number of years up until that point and I realized that a lot of programs were getting taken out of the urban environment. So how can I use what I know about our business and art-making to create better workforces? Can we essentially help to train a new set of people who could work in art, who enjoy it, and who may not also be from the demographic that is meant to do those jobs? It’s a vocational training program to a certain degree, but it is just meant for art people. So we operate out of the gallery, and we’re probably three-quarters into fully getting it to where I want it to be.
What’s the ultimate goal?
The grand scheme [plan] is to have a mix of young people coming from the Ivy Leagues and young people coming from systems that might not be formal education and then give them an experience that’s very clear and directed toward their impulses to learn curatorial skills. So far, we’ve done this through the New School, NYU, Columbia and Harvard. So young people are able to get credit for the level of work that they’re doing.
I think that much of my mission is to make sure that people of color are collecting more art, that they’re making better decisions with their money, that they are diversifying what they’re collecting, that it’s not just things that look like us, but that we are buying into the greater form of history. And I often say to folks who collect and who look like us, ‘Hey, you don’t have to only buy things that have Black figures in it.’
Not to overly commercialize the art buying, but when we buy stocks, we don’t buy stocks that are only owned by Black people or
buy in companies that only have Black CEOs. We buy everything, right? Because we’re trying to ensure that we are making the best decisions.
So when you’re buying aworkofart,Ithinkitis paramount that we look to find the best works of art, the best dealers and the best CEOs of those galleries. Because that may also help us ensure that we are making good decisions. Because the managers of those accounts are out there making the best decisions that they can in order to make sure these works are historically relevant. It’s not just the artist that makes it historically relevant. It’s all the surrounding players that are making sure the shows are happening and projects are being funded. So APT is meant to be that space for having these discussions. Much of my trajectory as a dealer and gallerist is to get people to talk about these things.