Lisa Perry grew up in Chicago, but she feels like she’s lived in New York her entire life. The loft she has owned at 383 West Broadway for more than two decades has been used as an art studio, a fashion design lab, and now as an experimental gallery space. In early November, Perry opened the doors to Onna House Soho, an urban offshoot of her East Hampton gallery housed in a 1962 Paul Lester Wiener-designed home that will exclusively showcase and celebrate women artists. The Observer caught up with Perry a few weeks after Soho opened. “That’s what this space has always been about,” she affirms. On’na means “woman” in Japanese, a word she insisted on using because of its similarity to “Nonna,” the Italian word for grandmother, which is what her grandchildren call her.
Onna House Soho is part salon, part art gallery, although it has a living room feel despite being filled with famous artwork by women. That said, Perry was completely uninterested in the rushed pace of the commercial art world. Series by artist Jessie Mordine Young, A year of weavinghangs on one of the first walls visitors see when entering the space. During the Observer’s visit, Young happened to have more works in the gallery and explained that her series is an everyday response to her surroundings. “This is the first time I’ve shared this work outside of the studio,” she explains, adding that she admires Perry’s “appreciation of hand marks and craftsmanship.”
“There aren’t a lot of galleries that focus on crafts,” Perry said. “It’s not every day that someone hangs a tapestry on their wall.” This explains her approach to sales, which is slow and thoughtful and includes carefully curated moments that allow collectors to see the pieces paired with furniture or otherwise installed in a way that would feel right at home. Perry told the Observer that she loved knowing how long it took to create a piece and that the series reminded her of “female hands and hearts.” Onna House in East Hampton follows the same philosophy. At a recent show in East Hampton, she displayed quilts on the wall, explaining that even something created out of necessity can still be art. Her gallery is part of a correction taking place right now, in which a medium often associated with women’s work and less appreciated is getting the treatment it deserves. More recently, exhibitions such as “Unraveling – The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art” at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and “The History of Weaving” at the Museum of Modern Art have brought works originally considered “craft” into the larger realm of fine art.
Open by appointment only, Onna House Soho’s exhibitions are loosely structured, with works rotating in and out and then replaced as collectors take them home. Perry and her team rearranged and curated small pieces in rooms organized around materials, regularly reorganizing and adjusting the pieces so they seemed harmonious within the space and the vintage furniture that filled it. “It turned out better than I thought it would,” Perry said. The gallery’s success supported her work as an artist and her forays into fashion, but ultimately she saw herself more as a curator.
In one hallway, Meta Struycken’s miniature coats hang on miniature racks, each one an ode to repairing clothing with visible patches and seam marks. During our walkthrough, Perry pulled out her own sweater, revealing a small hole in the sleeve. “I wear this so she can fix it,” she says, only half-jokingly, though the idea is in keeping with the ethos of Onna House and her engagement, support and personal connection with the artists she works with. Onna House, she says, is not only about showcasing impressive craftsmanship, but also about creating an intimate relationship between maker and object, collector and artist.
The artists she brings in all have impressive talent, so it’s impossible to pick a favorite. Leah Kaplan’s porcelain looks like soft clay, beautifully unfolding like a stretched piece of toffee. The bark of the tree is woven together with itself, an impressive sight that makes you question its complex inner workings. Many of the gallery’s artists also exhibit in other spaces. Hanging on the walls is a large tapestry by Hiroko Takeda, whose work is on display in “Minimum-Maximum,” a group exhibition at Hunter Dunbar Projects until January 17, 2026, alongside works by Helen Frankenthaler and Frank Stella. In the metal room are beautiful sculptures made entirely from safety pins by artist Tamiko Kawata, who currently has a solo exhibition at Alison Bradley Projects. Her process was born out of necessity, and upon arriving in the United States, she discovered that American clothes did not fit her—safety pins, originally a tool used to tighten clothing, became a medium.
Even in its first few months, Onna House Soho is poised to become an important countercurrent to New York City’s arts ecosystem. This is a place where slowness is valued, where craftsmanship is part of a larger lineage. In the last room (the reading room) there is a large work made from a single piece of wood, its dark pink shape inspired by the shape of the lungs. It embodies the feeling of leaving a loft: a feeling of having just stepped out of a carefully constructed world crafted by women who have an appreciation for the materials, the stories contained within them, and the art that makes them. Perry’s gallery is a breath of fresh air.
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