Uffner & Liu Gallery

This two-story gallery features three sunlit exhibition spaces: two downstairs and a garret with a skylight upstairs, where windows open onto the rooftops of the Lower East Side. It sits next door to a serene green space, one of those empty-lot-turned-gardens, the kind that speckle Loisaida’s downtown blocks.

Downstairs, the work can feel like peering through a window into a stranger’s private, domestic life: the sensual politics of the kitchen table, doorstep garden, and childhood bedroom. What’s on the surface, but also what’s underneath. The secrets, the sex, the things we don’t say.

Upstairs, emerging artists working through home from a distance — often, though not exclusively, Asian or of the Asian diaspora. Heritage, displacement, the places that shape you when you’re far away or searching for where you belong.

Rachel Uffner opened the gallery in 2008 on Orchard Street, when the area had more galleries than designer shops. In 2014, she moved to the current Suffolk Street building. From the beginning, the gallery has championed female-identifying artists, something she says arose more from instinct than intention. In 2025, she promoted Lucy Liu, one of the gallery’s directors, to partner. Liu curates the upstairs experimental space and runs a pop-up collective showcasing emerging Asian diaspora artists from her apartment.