Onyedika Chuke Onyedika Chuke

The Sun: Michiko Itatani’s Celestial Interiors, Replete With Earthly and Otherworldly Wonder

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.

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The New York Times Style Magazine: Where the Artists Are Present – and in Charge

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.

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Art in America: Five New Black-Run Art Spaces to Watch

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.

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Blau International No.3: REINVENTING THE DEAL

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).

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Artforum: “Storage_”

When the social-practice conference Open Engagement came to New York in 2014, I remember being struck by how much vital work in reimagining art’s capacity for community involvement was happening elsewhere in the United States, and by how comparatively little of it was reflected in the city’s vaunted museums, venerable nonprofits, or myriad commercial galleries. That may now be changing. Two of the most influential figures in the field of social practice, Theaster Gates and Rick Lowe—the founders of the Rebuild Foundation in Chicago and Project Row Houses in Houston’s Third Ward, respectively—both made their Manhattan debuts last fall, albeit at markedly different scales. In Chelsea, Gates staged his first New York solo exhibition at Gagosian’s flagship space on West Twenty-Fourth Street. More modestly, but perhaps more consequentially, Lowe contributed a single painting to “Storage”, the inaugural group show for Storage, a new space started by artist Onyedika Chuke. The underscore in the exhibition’s title evoked the file names in inventory databases while also nodding to Storage’s “underground” location, in the basement of a building on the Bowery.

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Artnet: Storage, a New Artist-Run Space in New York, Wants to Offer an Alternative to Exploitative Gallery Models

When artist Onyedika Chuke emerged from months of lockdown in New York City, there was one thing he felt he needed to do—and it wasn’t to see friends or to eat outdoors. It was to start a gallery.

He opened his space, called Storage, last month inside the basement art studio he’d been renting underneath a Korean restaurant on the Bowery. “It was a really run-down dusty space that I knew something magical could happen in,” Chuke told Artnet News.

The gallery—which opens at a moment when many other art businesses are facing financial challenges of historic proportions—aims to serve as an extension of Chuke’s artistic practice and activism. From the front end, it looks like a traditional commercial gallery, with a focus on work by women and people of color. But Chuke says he has embedded within it policies and practices that he hopes can model a more just art ecosystem.

Storage, he said, is “a gallery in form of a protest.”

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The New York Times: Ablaze With Art: Thriving Galleries in Lower Manhattan

The inaugural group show at this new project space, founded by the artist Onyedika Chuke in his own basement art studio, is a powerful mix of explicit politics and formal verve. Three of Emory Douglas’s graphic cover designs for the Black Panther newspaper remain as arresting as they were when he composed them 50 years ago. The Miami-based artist Yanira Collado contributes a spare, evocative sculpture reminiscent of a rooftop antenna, and a series of black-and-white photographs that document performances by Alicia Grullón are surprisingly striking in their own right. Two monumental works on paper — one, by William Cordova, a polymath of patterns, features a grayscale check pattern, and the other, by the Houston artist Rick Lowe, has a tidal wave of black marker lines on a golden yellow ground — are tacked directly to the walls, adding an extra burst of studio-visit excitement to an already energetic roundup.

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