Meet the Collector: Lisa Perry On Bringing Her Women-Centered Onna House to Soho

<img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" class="lazyload size-full-width wp-image-1603237" src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==" data-src="https://observer.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/12/image3.jpg?quality=80&w=970" alt="A woman stands smiling in a warm, wood-floored gallery space with textured wall hangings and low platform seating as part of Onna House Soho." width="970" height="776" data-caption='Lisa Perry at Onna House Soho. <span class=”lazyload media-credit”>Photo: Bre Johnson / BFA</span>’>

Lisa Perry grew up in Chicago but feels she’s lived in New York her entire life. The loft she’s owned for over two decades at 383 West Broadway has served, in its various incarnations, as art studio, fashion design laboratory and now, experimental gallery space. In early November, Perry opened the doors of Onna House Soho, an urban offshoot of her East Hampton gallery housed in a 1962 Paul Lester Wiener-designed home that will exclusively exhibit and celebrate women artists. Observer spoke with Perry a few weeks after the Soho opening. “This is what the space was always meant to be,” she affirmed. On’na means “woman” in Japanese, a word she clung to for its resemblance to the Italian word for grandmother, Nonna, which is what her grandchildren call her.

Onna House Soho is half salon, half art gallery, though it has the feel of a living room—albeit one filled with notable artworks by women. That said, Perry is wholly uninterested in the hurried rhythms of the commercial art world. Artist Jessie Mordine Young’s series, A Woven Year, hangs on one of the first walls visitors see when entering the space. Young happened to be dropping more work at the gallery during Observer’s visit and explained that her series is an immediate daily response to her surroundings. “It’s the first time I’m sharing this work outside my studio,” she explained, adding that she values Perry’s “appreciation for the trace of the hand, the craft.”

“There aren’t many galleries focused on craft.” Perry said. “It’s not every day someone hangs a tapestry on their wall.” That speaks to her approach to selling, which is slow and deliberate and involves carefully curating moments that let collectors see work paired with furniture or otherwise installed in a way that already feels like it’s in a home. Perry told Observer that she likes knowing how long it takes to make a work and that the collection reminds her of  “the hands and hearts of women.” Onna House in East Hampton operates on the same philosophy. In a recent show in East Hampton, she exhibited quilts on the wall, explaining that even things created out of necessity can still be art. Her gallery is part of a correction happening now, where mediums often associated with women’s work and taken less seriously are being given their due. Recently, shows such as the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam’s exhibition “Unravel – The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art” and MoMA’s “Woven Histories” have brought to light works originally deemed ‘craft,’ into the larger umbrella of fine art.

Onna House Soho is open by appointment only and exhibitions are loosely structured, with works rotated in or out and then replaced when taken home by a collector. Perry and her team rearrange and curate small vignettes of moments in rooms organized around materials, regularly restructuring and fitting the works to appear harmonious in the space and with the vintage furniture that fills it. “It turned out better than I could have imagined,” Perry said. The gallery’s success has supported her work as an artist and her foray into fashion, but ultimately she sees herself as more of a curator.

In one hallway, Meta Struycken’s small-scale coats hang from miniature racks, each an ode to repairing clothes with visible mending and stitch marks. During our walkthrough, Perry held out her own sweater, revealing a small hole in the sleeve. “I’m wearing this so she can fix it,” she said, half joking, though the idea aligns with the ethos of Onna House, as well as her involvement with, support of and personal connection to the artists with whom she works. Onna House, she says, is not only about exhibiting impressive craftsmanship but also about the intimacy between maker and object and between collector and artist.

The artists she brings in have impressive talent, so it’s impossible to pick a favorite. There are porcelain ceramics by Leah Kaplan that seem as if they are still soft clay, beautifully unfolding like a stretched-out piece of taffy. There is tree bark that is woven into itself, an impressive sight that makes you question its intricate inner workings. Many of the gallery’s artists also exhibit in other spaces. Large tapestries hang on the wall by Hiroko Takeda, who has work in the group exhibition “Minimal-Maximal” at Hunter Dunbar Projects through January 17, 2026, which places her work alongside that of Helen Frankenthaler and Frank Stella. In the metal room, there are exquisite 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, as upon arriving in the States, she found that American clothes didn’t fit her—safety pins, initially a tool with which to tighten clothes, became a medium.

Even in these early months, Onna House Soho already feels primed to become an important countercurrent to New York City’s art ecosystem. It’s a place where slowness is valued and craft is part of a larger lineage. In one of the last rooms—the reading room—is a large work crafted from a piece of wood with dark pink shapes inspired by the shape of lungs. It exemplifies the sensation of leaving the loft: a feeling of having just stepped out of a world built with care for materials, for the stories embedded in them and for the women who craft works of art. Perry’s gallery is a breath of fresh air.

More art collector profiles

• Art Collector Raphaël Isvy Wants to Rewrite the Rules of Buying and Selling

• How Kim Manocherian Is Building Narratives Through Art

• For John Wieland, Collecting Art Is About Feeling at Home

• Collector Yu Kimoto Explains How Japan’s Next Gen Collectors Are Rethinking the Art World

• Nancy Olnick and Giorgio Spanu Share the Passion and Vision Behind Magazzino Italian Art

• Kayode Adegbola On Building a Gallery That Reflects His Passions