How I might fit into the midwest art world
Today I heard it expressed that something interesting is happening in the midwest, post industrial, agro-industrial cities like chicago, st louis, indianapolis. For decades, contemporary American art has largely been driven by New York, Los Angeles, and increasingly online/global discourse. Much of it revolves around identity, theory, institutional critique, or highly polished market-friendly objects.
The Midwest seems to be moving in another direction.
That is being seen in What I’m see in Chicago especially, but also St. Louis, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Detroit, and smaller university cities—is a renewed interest in making work that is:
- materially grounded!
- handmade!
- humorous!
- philosophically curious!
- suspicious of certainty!
- regional without being nostalgic!
- intellectually ambitious without academic jargon!
A recent Chicago exhibition even framed this as a distinctly *”Midwestern” conceptualism*: artists embracing slowness, studied nonchalance, and resisting the pressure to constantly produce or optimize. The curators described it as a “Midwestern alternative to the demands of artistic production as a rat race.”
An anthropologist at MIT recently proposed the term “paraindustrial.”
Instead of industry disappearing, industry and its ruins now coexist:
- abandoned grain elevators
- active rail lines
- logistics warehouses
- Amazon fulfillment centers
- old brick factories
- data centers
- soybean fields
- biotech labs
None of these erased the others.
They all exist simultaneously. The Midwest has become a landscape where every historical layer remains visible.
Things I need to think about and learn about next:
- the way Chicago Imagists used humor rather than irony.
- using humor as a philosophical tool rather than just a visual style.
- how the Imagists believed high culture and low culture were artificial distinctions and could co-exist.
- what their on going influence and legacy is today.
What I learned already is that my brand of pop art aligns with them more than any other. Rather than being cool, detached, emotionally flat, they focus on handmade, funny, awkward, persona, mystical, psychological. Not just observing culture, but inhabiting it.
Like a joke makes you briefly hold two contradictory ideas at once, that is what my work does. Not making visual jokes though, but rather using humor to destabilize certainty.
I certainly don’t look at their work and find imagery that is similar to mine, but the philosophy is spot on. LOL.