WEST BY MIDWEST

WEST BY MIDWEST
17.11.2018 - 27.01.2019

Art history is often neatly told through the touchstones of individual artists and stylistic movements. West by Midwest tells a messier story of contemporary art—one that illuminates the ways that contemporary art practices spread and develop by tracing the intersecting lives of artists who have migrated from the American Midwest to the West Coast since the mid-20th century. Lured by career opportunities, warmer weather, and the prospect of a better life promised by the postwar boom, those artists who were able to migrate attended art schools together, shared studios, exhibited work in the same galleries, collaborated on projects, engaged in activism, and dated. Following these crisscrossing lines of kinship, West by Midwest reveals social, artistic, and intellectual networks of artists and their shared experiences of making work and making a life.

Divided into six sections, West by Midwest presents more than 80 artworks in a wide variety of media, made by some 63 artists from the 1960s through the 2010s. Each section maps three overlapping forms of kinship: practice, or the ways that artists make and approach their work; place, or the spaces where artists congregate and exchange ideas; and people, or the manifold human relationships that compose artists’ personal and professional circles. This story of contemporary art’s spread from the Midwest to the West Coast focuses on formal, material, and historical affinities among these artists, disrupting the mythic solo journey to the western frontier founded on an aspirational ethos of American individualism and independence. Anchored by works in the MCA’s collection, West by Midwest eschews a definitive survey of individuals’ achievements to instead consider how artists move and make work within a larger field of relations.

West by Midwest is organized by Charlotte Ickes, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow, with Michael Darling, James W. Alsdorf Chief Curator. It is presented in the Griffin Galleries of Contemporary Art on the museum's fourth floor.

ARTISTS IN THE EXHIBITION INCLUDE:
José Antonio Aguirre, Carlos Almaraz, Garo Antreasian, Judith Barry, Larry Bell, Billy Al Bengston, Patrick Blackwell, Andrea Bowers, Vija Celmins, Judy Chicago, Bruce Conner, Robert Cumming, Aaron Curry, Emory Douglas, Hal Fischer, Roy De Forest, Joe Goode, Anna Halprin, David Hammons, Judithe Hernández, Douglas Huebler, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Jim Isermann, Suzanne Jackson, Stephen J. Kaltenbach, Barbara Kasten, Mike Kelley, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Tom Marioni, Jerry McMillan, Rodney McMillian, Rebecca Morris, Bruce Nauman, Senga Nengudi, Kori Newkirk, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Catherine Opie, John Outterbridge, Laura Owens, Jorge Pardo, Stephen Prina, Amanda Ross-Ho, Sterling Ruby, Allen Ruppersberg, Ed Ruscha, Miriam Schapiro, Melanie Schiff, Jim Shaw, June Wayne, William Wegman, Charles White, William T. Wiley, Mason Williams, and Karl Wirsum.