Lisa Perry grew up in Chicago however feels she’s lived in New York her whole life. The loft she’s owned for over twenty years at 383 West Broadway has served, in its numerous incarnations, as artwork studio, style design laboratory and now, experimental gallery area. In early November, Perry opened the doorways of Onna Home Soho, an city offshoot of her East Hampton gallery housed in a 1962 Paul Lester Wiener-designed house that may solely exhibit and rejoice girls artists. Observer spoke with Perry a number of weeks after the Soho opening. “That is what the area was all the time meant to be,” she affirmed. On’na means “lady” in Japanese, a phrase she clung to for its resemblance to the Italian phrase for grandmother, Nonna, which is what her grandchildren name her.
Onna Home Soho is half salon, half artwork gallery, although it has the texture of a front room—albeit one crammed with notable artworks by girls. That stated, Perry is wholly uninterested within the hurried rhythms of the industrial artwork world. Artist Jessie Mordine Younger’s collection, A Woven 12 months, hangs on one of many first partitions guests see when coming into the area. Younger occurred to be dropping extra work on the gallery throughout Observer’s go to and defined that her collection is a direct each day response to her environment. “It’s the primary time I’m sharing this work exterior my studio,” she defined, including that she values Perry’s “appreciation for the hint of the hand, the craft.”
“There aren’t many galleries targeted on craft.” Perry stated. “It’s not every single day somebody hangs a tapestry on their wall.” That speaks to her method to promoting, which is sluggish and deliberate and entails rigorously curating moments that permit collectors see work paired with furnishings or in any other case put in in a manner that already feels prefer it’s in a house. Perry advised Observer that she likes understanding how lengthy it takes to make a piece and that the gathering reminds her of “the fingers and hearts of girls.” Onna Home in East Hampton operates on the identical philosophy. In a latest present in East Hampton, she exhibited quilts on the wall, explaining that even issues created out of necessity can nonetheless be artwork. Her gallery is a part of a correction occurring now, the place mediums usually related to girls’s work and brought much less critically are being given their due. Lately, reveals such because the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam’s exhibition “Unravel – The Energy and Politics of Textiles in Artwork” and MoMA’s “Woven Histories” have dropped at mild works initially deemed ‘craft,’ into the bigger umbrella of nice artwork.
Onna Home Soho is open by appointment solely and exhibitions are loosely structured, with works rotated in or out after which changed when taken house by a collector. Perry and her staff rearrange and curate small vignettes of moments in rooms organized round supplies, recurrently restructuring and becoming the works to seem harmonious within the area and with the classic furnishings that fills it. “It turned out higher than I might have imagined,” Perry stated. The gallery’s success has supported her work as an artist and her foray into style, however finally she sees herself as extra of a curator.
In a single hallway, small-scale coats dangle from miniature racks, every an ode to repairing garments with seen mending and sew marks. Throughout our walkthrough, Perry held out her personal sweater, revealing a small gap within the sleeve. “I’m sporting this so she will be able to repair it,” she stated, half joking, although the concept aligns with the ethos of Onna Home, in addition to her involvement with, assist of and private connection to the artists with whom she works. Onna Home, she says, is just not solely about exhibiting spectacular craftsmanship but additionally concerning the intimacy between maker and object and between collector and artist.
The artists she brings in have spectacular expertise, so it’s unimaginable to select a favourite. There are porcelain ceramics by Leah Kaplan that appear as if they’re nonetheless smooth clay, fantastically unfolding like a stretched-out piece of taffy. There’s tree bark that’s woven into itself, a powerful sight that makes you query its intricate inside workings. Lots of the gallery’s artists additionally exhibit in different areas. Massive tapestries dangle on the wall by Hiroko Takeda, who has work within the group exhibition “Minimal-Maximal” at Hunter Dunbar Initiatives by January 17, 2026, which locations her work alongside that of Helen Frankenthaler and Frank Stella. Within the steel room, there are beautiful sculptures made solely from security pins by artist Tamiko Kawata, who at present has a solo exhibition at Alison Bradley Initiatives. Her course of was born out of necessity, as upon arriving within the States, she discovered that American garments didn’t match her—security pins, initially a software with which to tighten garments, turned a medium.
Even in these early months, Onna Home Soho already feels primed to turn out to be an necessary countercurrent to New York Metropolis’s artwork ecosystem. It’s a spot the place slowness is valued and craft is an element of a bigger lineage. In one of many final rooms—the studying room—is a big work crafted from a chunk of wooden with darkish pink shapes impressed by the form of lungs. It exemplifies the feeling of leaving the loft: a sense of getting simply stepped out of a world constructed with take care of supplies, for the tales embedded in them and for the ladies who craft artworks. Perry’s gallery is a breath of contemporary air.
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