Superhouse Gets Supersized with New Location

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Superhouse founder Stephen Markos tested the waters of running a gallery when he opened a small 200-square-feet spot in a Chinatown, New York mall. Now he’s making a splash half a mile away with a much larger location, aptly located at the precise point where Walker Street and Canal Street meet. 

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Located on the sixth floor of the seven-story building, the gallery’s new location has large windows on three sides that open up to 180-degree views of the city. To the west, there is a bird’s eye view of TriBeCa’s bustling art and design community. Canal Street shops line one facade of the building, and galleries (Someday and Off Paradise, so far) have taken up shop in the other. A block away on Walker Street is Francis Irv gallery, Markos’ friend and former neighbor.The 1,500-square-foot space is the culmination of Markos' five-years-and-counting project that started as a series of virtual and pop-up exhibitions during the pandemic.

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Inspired by alternative art spaces, especially in New York in the early ‘80s, Markos debuted his original cubicle-style lot in 2021. “I would always try to install the show so it was first-and-foremost viewable from behind the windows. So when you're out in the hallway of the mall and you look through the windows, you could get a real sense of the exhibition,” he remembers. The gallery brought Markos’ titillating Venn diagram of art and furniture and design to the masses. And since it opened, there has been no slowing down. In the two years that followed, Superhouse became a mainstay of the downtown mall, drawing packed rooms to its opening and catching eyes online from art and design enthusiasts alike. 

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Now at 120 Walker Street, Markos is imagining a new chapter that is rooted in the experimentation that his first unconventional space inspired. Its opening will be inaugurated with a solo show in mid-March featuring works by the acclaimed Ghanaian sculptor Paa Joe, best-known for his coffins that take the forms of everyday objects and animals in hyper-realistic yet oversized shapes.“These works are sculpture first and foremost, but they do technically have a function; the large-scale coffins are still made today around Accra to be used as coffins,” shares Markos, who notes the move comes with an expanded curation, too. While the problem of fitting a lot into a little is no longer in the front of Markos’ mind, he says, “the same sense of discovery will carry over to the new space.”

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‍Superhouse, 120 Walker Street, New York, NY 10013.