The Colander Is Still Falling: Five Artists the Midwest Can't Quite Explain
On a January afternoon in a Chicago gallery, a stainless steel colander tips off a kitchen counter and seems to keep falling past the edge of the canvas. The painting is by Ellen Lanyon, and nothing about it explains itself. A saucepan glints with unease. A vine curls too deliberately near a window.
Visitors slow down without quite knowing why. This is representational painting behaving like a held breath, ordinary objects rendered patient and watchful, as if the room itself were about to change its mind. Lanyon painted this vigilance out of the everyday for five decades, until her death in 2013.
Lanyon is one of five artists working across the American Midwest whose careers resist a single label or lineage. What links them is not a shared style, a shared decade, or even a shared temperament — it is geography, and not much else. As the Artnet Gallery Network piece profiling them puts it, "There is no through line of what it means to be a Midwestern artist" beyond the fact of living and working there. There is no unifying story. Only a shared mailing region.
Library of Congress, Carol M. Highsmith Archive (dedicated copyright-free for public use) — Exterior of the Art Institute of Chicago, present day. Atmosphere image only, not a depiction of any artist or artwork.
Those conditions have a history. Chicago's School of the Art Institute (SAIC) and the Ox-Bow School of Art in Saugatuck, Michigan, trained Lanyon before she fell in with the Chicago Imagists of the 1960s and '70s, a loose circle known for irreverent, cartoon-inflected figuration. Ninety minutes northeast, Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills built a different kind of lineage.
That lineage shaped McArthur Binion, who left Wayne State University in Detroit for a Cranbrook MFA, and later Beverly Fishman, who arrived from the East Coast in 1992 to lead its painting department for nearly three decades.
Kay Rosen's text works — letters sliced and stacked until language becomes shape — earned her a rare compliment from outside the art world: the poet Eileen Myles once called her "the poet of the art world." It is a fitting description for an artist represented by Krakow Witkin Gallery, whose 2011 piece "Sweet Dreams" turns a phrase into an architectural event. Galleries from Richard Gray to Xavier Hufkens to Weber Fine Art have each staked a claim on this loosely bound cohort.
In that 2011 piece, Rosen stacks all eleven letters of "SWEET DREAMS" directly on top of one another, compressing a normal left-to-right phrase into a single dense knot of color barely six inches wide. She built the series around two private rules: each phrase must start and end on the same letter, and its meaning must comment on its own illegibility — here, a phrase about the disorder of dreaming rendered as literal, chromatic disorder. Legibility isn't the point; the collapse of legibility is.
Kay Rosen, "Sweet Dreams" (2011), acrylic gouache on watercolor paper, courtesy Krakow Witkin Gallery (photographer not credited by gallery). Used under critical-commentary/fair-quotation terms; analysis appears in the adjacent paragraph.
The region's supposed insularity turns out to be a myth on closer look. Binion was born in Macon, Mississippi, and moved to Detroit at five; he became, at Cranbrook, the first Black student to earn an MFA in painting there, a fact easy to miss inside his cool, obsessively gridded surfaces.
That grid resolves a little in a specific work like "Visual:Ear" (2022), where Binion collages fragments of a musical score — drawn from composer Henry Threadgill's "Still Standing Stuttering" — onto a board, then works over it in dense, hand-laid strokes of paint stick until the notation only surfaces at close range. The piece belongs to a project he first sketched as a student in 1971, trying to translate music into a visual field; five decades later, the score is still there, just buried under labor.
Whether that biographical detail illuminates the work or simply makes an austere, wordless grid easier to talk about is left open — the paintings themselves offer no caption. Fishman's pill-shaped abstractions, ringed in surgical color, trace back to a childhood on the East Coast, not the Midwest at all.
Rosen herself was born in Corpus Christi, Texas, and now divides her year between Gary, Indiana, and New York. The Midwest, it turns out, is less a birthplace than a landing point.
It is fair to ask who the grouping actually serves. The profile that files these five careers under one geographic banner is not a museum survey or a peer-reviewed catalogue; it is a gallery network's showcase, built to move inventory and reach collectors. A piece that admits up front it has found no shared style or subject is, by its own account, working harder to hold its premise together than the artists are.
There is an asymmetry worth naming, too. Cranbrook and SAIC are not provincial also-rans — like Yale and RISD, their MFA programs have long sent graduates directly into New York and Brussels gallery representation, several of the artists profiled here among them. Yet an artist trained at Yale is rarely filed under "Northeastern artist." The regional tag seems to attach more readily to the middle of the country than to the coasts, which raises a real question: does "Midwestern" describe anything these five practices actually share, or does it mostly mark distance from the places that get to assume they need no such label at all?
Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company Collection, 1900–1910 (public domain) — Cleveland's Public Square, early 20th century, evoking Anthony Mitri's home city. Atmosphere image only.
Anthony Mitri has never needed to leave. He still works from Cleveland, translating his own reference photographs into drawings so spare they seem to hold their breath, memory distilled until almost nothing remains but feeling and a startling, exact use of color. His 2023 "Snow Fence Variations" reads like a diagram of restraint.
Unlike the other four, his is a career built on staying rather than arriving, which either makes him the most Midwestern of the five or simply the one whose work has never had to test the label against a return address.
Taken together, these five practices sit at strange angles to one another: a grid, a pill, a sentence, a snow fence, a falling colander. Whether they belong in the same sentence at all rests more on a gallery network's roster than on any shared visual logic anyone here has been able to name.
The colander is still falling. The category never quite closes.
Reference : ARTNET
