Midwest Nice at Not Real Art

We love seeing what our midwest nice artists are up to! NOT REAL ART has been a supporter of us from the beginning (huge shoutout to Morgan Laurens!) and their summer show was a big surprise; titled “Midwest Nice”! Congrats to Kaitlyn Jo Smith, Jane Waggoner Deschner, and Epiphany Knedler! ✨ Kaitlyn Jo was in the original nice;01 exhibition, Jane is in nice;03, Art as Storytelling, a fervent and necessary arrangement, and Epiphany is the co-founder and curator for Midwest Nice Art. Check it all out here!

Midwest Nice: An Exhibition Statement From Curator Morgan Laurens

The first time I saw The Wizard of Oz, I thought Dorothy must be daft. Leave the Emerald City, the winged monkeys, the outrageously fashionable footwear, for what? A yard full of grey pigs and a hatchet-faced neighbor who wants to kill her dog? The girl must be stark-raving mad.

Growing up in a dog-loving family on a small farm in rural Southwest Ohio, I found enough surface similarities between my childhood and Dorothy’s that I balked at the thought of returning to the Midwest when escape was an option. If there were a portal to Oz through the Midwest, you could bet your sweet bippy I’d be on the first tornado into Munchkinland with my little dog in tow. Alas, Dorothy and I hail from different sides of the Midwest. Tornadoes never blew through my town, and frankly, the Gales’ Depression-era prairie core never jibed with the industrial decay that characterizes the Eastern Rust Belt where I grew up. The region overlaps with but is distinct from the Midwest, encompassing Ohio, parts of Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan, and extending around Lake Erie into Pennsylvania and New York. Think Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit. Port cities with a bright future, once.

For as long as I can remember, people have argued over where the Midwest begins and ends. Some say the Dakotas are fair game (they are), while others insist that Pennsylvania qualifies (it's debatable), or even extend it to include West Virginia (not a chance). Some regions in this country—the West Coast, the Southwest, the Mountain States—are clearly defined, while the boundaries of the Midwest have always been amorphous. For the purposes of clarity, our June exhibition, Midwest Nice, includes artists and work from Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma. The work spans the South Dakota plains and the Rust Belt, swoops down to the Ohio River, then rises upward toward Detroit and the Great Lakes. We’ll also stop in the improbable architectural mecca of Columbus, IN, before heading east into Chicago, before it’s all over. So buckle up, slap on some sunscreen, and pee now because there’s no telling where the road will take us once we get going.