No Sofa, All Sculpture: Inside a Brooklyn Gallerist's Art-First Apartment

By Elena Vasquez

There is no sofa in Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels's Clinton Hill apartment. The senior director of Jack Shainman Gallery prefers chairs she describes as sculptural and funky, and her two-bedroom home, renovated over four years, is built entirely around the viewing experience.

The mirrors tell the story. Roughly 10-foot panes of glass had to be hauled through a window on last-minute scaffolding after the stairs were mismeasured. "The neighbors were not used to that," Bellorado-Samuels says with a laugh. The panes now line one wall of the open-plan living area, adding dimension and reflecting the room and its windows.

Who is the collector behind the rooms?

Bellorado-Samuels began her career at the Studio Museum in Harlem. She then joined Jack Shainman Gallery as an assistant to cofounder Claude Simard, rising to senior director. She also runs the itinerant gallery project We Buy Gold, which plays on themes of art and commerce. Both ventures and her home share one trait: an appetite for friction.

Comfort regularly loses to concept. In the extra bedrooms, storage was sacrificed for wall space. In her own bedroom, the television lives under the bed while works by Barkley Hendricks, Sadie Barnett, and Charisse Pearlina Weston take pride of place. The second bedroom was given over to a custom bookshelf that took ten months to develop with a millworker, Paul Finsterwald, whom she met through the gallery.

Where does the collecting instinct come from?

Her roots are in San Francisco. Her father, Joe Sam, was a political activist and artist who often worked with found materials. "We would go to the train tracks and collect things for his art that would end up on the kitchen table," she remembers. "There's a certain practice of care you develop in just loving objects and the things that you live with. All you need is a little bit of restraint and you're golden."

The apartment hunt itself began with a childhood ritual. She and her mother toured open houses on weekends, and they revived the tradition one Mother's Day. "I lined up a bunch of apartments to look at the weekend she came," she says. "This was one of them."

What history does the building carry?

The building's front dates to around 1850 and the rear to around 1900. It was once a women's home, with the rear portion built as an infirmary. After years vacant, it became the Bull Shippers Inn, fell into disrepair, and acquired the atmosphere of a neighborhood haunted house. It was eventually bought, renovated, and divided into 26 apartments.

Bellorado-Samuels embraces the traces of those previous lives: the original façade, a strange little window no one can explain, and the imperfect exposed brick. "People who know brick tell me it's a really terrible patch job, but I love how ragtag and random it is," she says.

What does the home argue for?

The architecture does not disappear behind the collection. It pushes back, amplifies, complicates, and occasionally inconveniences it. "I like that in this space you can see all kinds of different art," she says. "People think they can't live with sculpture—I love living with sculpture. Do you just want paintings of flowers? That's fine, but there are other things."

Her parting advice: measure twice.