Installation view of One featuring Pelumi Sokunbi’s “We Speak Laughter in Every Language” (2025, rusted steel and rope).
Courtesy of Chorus, documentation by Owen Forbes.

Chorus: On Intention

I first heard about Chorus, a new gallery and curatorial project, through a series of outlying points of connection: a friend from high school and an Instagram account suggestion. What did surprise me then, was that I looked up Chorus’s address to find that it was opening just down the block from my apartment on Jefferson Street.

From the outside, 59 Jefferson Street reads as an unassuming apartment building, much like every other building on the street. Up until this point, I had always thought the people I’d seen coming in and out of the keypad-locked entrance were tenants of a residential building like mine.

The ecosystem of apartment galleries in New York, with Chorus as no exception, does work like this: complete shows tucked away into the corners of curators’ living rooms and the auxiliary floors of apartment buildings. And, unlike the downtown and Chelsea commercial gallery scenes, they are untethered from the control and influence of their geographic locations. However, Chorus does share some nearby neighbors like apartment gallery mimo, and one chronicled connection to contemporary gallery 15 Orient’s previous location on 12 Jefferson Street. When 15 Orient opened this second location in 2020, the Jefferson Street apartment’s second floor was reinvented into gallery space, the wood trim and walls all painted over white. After four years, the gallery moved to its current location on Walker Street in Tribeca. If you search for 15 Orient on Apple Maps, their location still pings as 12 Jefferson Street.

Installation view of One courtesy of Chorus, documentation by Owen Forbes.

Just as galleries and artist-run spaces have always been a mainstay in the history of downtown Manhattan and New York more broadly, so have the questions they bring about gentrification, real estate, and their relationships with residents and other workers in the area. Just earlier this year, it was reported that some downtown galleries had come together to strategize on how to control and mitigate the street vendors along Manhattan’s Canal Street, encouraging each other to file complaints with 311 to escalate their issue to the city government. At the same time, the shuttering of a number of smaller, much adored downtown galleries in the past year (here I think about Deli Gallery and Francis Irv) means less avenues towards a scene supportive of emerging artists in the city. It was this tension, alongside my own physical proximity, which first drew me to Chorus. What niches can new apartment galleries occupy and inscribe into this history with their unique, physically covert mode of operation?

I first visited Chorus during the opening of Owen Forbes’s solo exhibition of photography, and the gallery’s third show, You might be taller now. Upon entering 59 Jefferson Street, I discovered that, unlike what I had assumed, the building was in fact not solely an apartment building, but a mixed-use building, holding a variety of storage units and studios as well as residential units. My introduction to Chorus only continued to be a series of little surprises. At first, the large crowd obfuscated much of the work. I felt as if I was coming to first find the gallery’s identity through its social sphere: one that felt young, energetic, and, as I discovered by talking to more and more of the opening’s attendees, connected to Wesleyan, Chorus founder and director Archie Caride’s alma mater.

Installation view of You might be taller now, courtesy of Chorus, documentation by Owen Forbes.

Presented as a suite of 10 archival pigment prints, the photographs in the show constellated across the four walls of the gallery:

1. Wire fencing running over a grove of trees in shade

2. A bright, almost overexposed wing of light hitting a doorframe

3. The side profile of a topless man, circular marks impressed into his arm.

The images sat just far enough from each other to leave a similar feeling of impression. The only larger photograph, “Admission,” was 50 x 40 inches, while the remaining nine ranged from six to 24 inches in height. Here, scale was not used to command attention. My eyes moved quickly from point to point, leaving only the trace of the previous image to inform my understanding of the next one in my line of sight.

It was this arrangement of the images that interested me, spare enough that one might second-guess the apartment’s radiator, nestled in the negative space between photographs, as a part of the installation.

The last thing I saw, as they were obscured by dozens of feet, were the final two photographs framed onto the wooden floor. One of concrete and the other of an aerial view of mountain terrain, the two images felt like a natural conclusion for the way Chorus fused the space’s architecture with its art, becoming an amalgamation.

I had only been able to briefly say hello to Caride at the Chorus opening, but he kindly met with me over coffee the following week. Maybe as expected, we both work at Chelsea galleries only a few streets away from each other. It’s the flexibility of having this day job, alongside his connections in the city as a native New Yorker, that Caride credits with enabling him to run Chorus as a non-commercial space while still being intentional about his curatorial choices.

Throughout our conversation, intentionality was the baseline we kept returning to. The idea for Chorus first came about from Caride’s own practice as explored in Wesleyan’s studio art department and its open studio structure. There, he realized that through the critique of and conversation about his classmates’ work, he could contribute to the contemporary art world through a means beyond his own art making.

After graduating, Caride was searching for a way to channel this interest when he realized that, by virtue of having a physical space, he could simply choose to do it. The room that became Chorus, found on Craigslist, is a point of intention itself. The natural architecture of the space came with it, the only changes being a fresh coat of white paint and new light bulbs. The choice to leave its original fixtures bare—the radiator, a jutting column in one corner of the room, the AC pipe—allows for shows to be built around what exists already instead of presenting a blank slate. My initial interests in Chorus were just this: what exactly about the location on Jefferson Street felt right for Chorus, and what does its location mean for gallery goers and residents alike? Caride emphasized that it wasn't necessarily the neighborhood that drew him to Jefferson Street, but the room itself (although having neighboring apartment galleries like mimo and Benny’s Video certainly helps). Being housed in a mixed-use and residential building means that those who come to Chorus have come just for that purpose. Simultaneously, among the studios, storage units, and apartments Caride has described as friendly and rather supportive neighbors, the space blends into the building’s social architecture.

There is something interesting about considering the room as a stellar point, and not just somewhere you might stumble into. Caride and I talked about 15 Orient as well. While Jefferson Street seemed like a stopgap towards commercial expansion in the downtown gallery scene for 15 Orient, Chorus intends to make refuge here. Caride thinks of expansion differently, in factors beyond space and capital: he spoke about impact, publications, public programming, and, central to his curatorial vision, finding a way forward for his friends and community. Perhaps intentionality in expansion might mean not just assimilating into the space’s discrete room on Jefferson Street, but a more concerted effort bringing other neighbors into Chorus’s inner world.

The press release—which I was only able to grab upon a Sunday revisit to Forbes’s show without the swarming crowd—reads: “Ultimately, these images come together to explore distance. How far will this rock travel if I throw it with all my strength? How long did it take that scar to heal? And where did it even come from? How distant from each other are we really? And how far can I go?”

The potentiality of connection in this space feels true to Chorus. After all, the word “chorus” itself evokes this reflection, with its lexical roots ranging from a unified ensemble of singers, a classical Greek chorus, the repeated refrain of a song—all intentional simultaneities. Chorus’s first two exhibitions show this well. The first: a group show that brought together artists across generations. The second: a curatorial exercise on the remnants of memory, with artists from both Caride’s community at Wesleyan and some newer connections. Currently slated for November is the space’s first solo exhibition of work by Brooklyn-based artist Pelumi Sokunbi, a close friend of Caride’s from his art school studio origins.

Over the course of the space’s first year, it will be interesting to see how Caride's curatorial vision of intentionality radiates from 59 Jefferson—who it will reach out to, and who will choose to seek it out.