The Regional: Art from the American Midwest

The first major multi-museum survey dedicated to contemporary artists based in the Midwest, The Regional  brings together work by 23 artists working across painting, photography, installation, and performance.

Loosely defined as the area that stretches from the Dakotas along the Great Lakes to Michigan and Ohio to Minnesota along the Mississippi River through Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri, it is largely a construct bound by geography, sociocultural events, and historical commonalities.

The exhibition contains six major themes; "landscape and abstraction", "immigrant experience and labor", "architecture and notions of home", "healing from from ethnic and racial traumas", "Americana and pop culture", and "portraiture and identity."

Using weaving, photography, and painting, artists explore the ways in which contested histories, personal memory, and identity are rooted in both the landscape of the Midwest and other real and imagined places.

Featuring woven panels of found imagery of waterways, severe
weather events, and topographic maps alongside brain scans, Wandering Path refers to climate catastrophe, infrastructure, and mental health.

Rachel Cox, Anissa Lewis, Rashawn Griffin, and use photography, installation, painting, and drawing to examine historical or present-day neighborhoods and environments that hold personal significance. 

Rashawn Griffin's selection of eighty intimate drawings act like a visual diary of his travels throughout the Midwest and elsewhere.

"In reality, the weather that day had not been ideal."

"The rolling thunder had lied. it was the ocean's disguise. The swell was beautiful and deadly. They lived like this."

The Pleasant Street (ongoing) series features photographs of the the street where Lewis grew up in Covington, KY, overlaid with family portraits from the artist’s childhood. The images memorialize the neglected block as the vibrant working-class Black community it once was.

Cox locates the suburbs as a site where tribalistic thinking and the false promises of working-class America were cultivated. The works in the series Wake Up (2020–ongoing) are composed of hundreds of small-scale homes the artist fabricated out of construction paper.

As the Midwest becomes more diverse there has been a rise in ethnic and racially charged violence. Lorena Molina and Jordan Weber each try to flush out alternative narratives and create space for healing as it relates to these traumas.

In Reconciliation Garden (2021), Lorena Molina asks viewers to think about their consumption of coffee. In the height of the coffee production in El Salvador, 95% of the country’s income came from coffee crops, yet the land was owned by only one percent of the population.

The Salvadoran Civil War was fought between the military-led junta government of El Salvador and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front. The U.S. contributed four billion dollars in aid, training of elite military troops, and supplying sophisticated weaponry.

In Perennial Philosophies (2021) two Minneapolis-sourced obsidian boulders placed about six feet from each other include plaques that read “INHALE….” “EXHALE….” As reminders to rest, these plaques highlight the injustice associated with who feels safe in their own environment.

The words "Inhale" and "Exhale" serve as reminders that the fight for justice is long and arduous, and that everyone deserves the opportunity to rest.

Dan Gunn and Alice Tippit are inspired by the times in which they live. Thinking through the mythologies of the Midwest as farmland and popular culture seen in films, they relate the familiar to ideologies of this region and question the relationship to the present.

Gunn’s work is an investigation of the aesthetic and folklore surrounding the Midwest. Within his freestanding sculptures, Gunn masterfully depicts both the grotesque and the intriguing.

Tippit reduces imagery to fundamental shapes, using shifts in scale and perception to produce an image that generates more questions than answers. In both Cull (2021) and Dove (2021), the mysterious form seems to be a portrait, but also resembles landscape or a still life.

Conrad Egyir and Gisela McDaniel create works that discuss how race, ethnicity, and immigration status play into their experiences living in the middle of America. 

Conrad Egyir creates work that uses Afrocentric folklore rooted in political and religious erudition. A large figure wearing doctoral robes makes a clear juxtaposition between the educational robes of Western culture and the African mud cloth on the man’s face mask.

Gisela McDaniel created portraits of maternal figures important to the artist’s growth. These works include recordings of each woman discussing her experiences and sheets of Plexiglas the same size as the canvas. This creates a respectful boundary between viewer and subject.