How to Make a Scene: Artist-Run Midwest explores how artist-led initiatives have shaped the rich and often underrepresented cultural landscape of the American Midwest. For generations, these essential grassroots platforms have fostered artistic experimentation, built resilient networks of support, and become vital sites for social and civic engagement. Artist-run spaces have also been critical for historically marginalized communities to resist cultural erasure, by creating strong social bonds outside of mainstream institutions.
This exhibition builds on extensive oral history research conducted by curators jes allie, Brandon Alvendia, and Kimi Kitada to connect the artists’ lived experiences with the collective movements that define this region’s artist-run culture. The exhibition brings together projects from the Greater Midwest with contributions from artists in both major cities and lesser-known artistic enclaves, organized around interwoven themes of care, independent publishing, and the rural imagination. They are united by a shared artist-led vision of space: whether physical or conceptual, rooted or itinerant, an artist-run space is one by and for people that exists to offer alternative forms of support and resources, built on community values. Each project responds to its hyperlocal context, serving the needs of neighbors and generating radical forms of civic engagement.
How to Make a Scene: Artist-Run Midwest positions artist-run initiatives as central to cultural history: not as peripheral or incidental, but critical to forming, sustaining, and mobilizing artistic communities today. As the exhibition travels, it offers hosting art spaces a flexible framework to surface their own local histories of artist-led initiatives, and invites dialogue between regional narratives and place-based experience.
How to Make a Scene: Artist-Run Midwest is a traveling exhibition curated by jes allie, Brandon Alvendia, and Kimi Kitada. It is produced by Independent Curators International (ICI), New York. Lead funding for the exhibition is provided by Hartfield Foundation as part of an initiative that supports ICI’s commitment to new curatorial voices who will shape the future of the field, and ICI’s Curatorial Intensive alumni as they move through the stages of their career. The exhibition is made possible with additional support by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Curatorial Research Fellowship Grant, ICI’s Board of Trustees, and members of ICI’s International Forum.
