2025 Midwest Regional

Juror Statement

As a lifelong Midwesterner and multimedia artist, I was honored to jury Artlink’s 2025 Midwest Regional and to review the incredible range of creative work produced by artists across the states of Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas. The hundreds of submissions I reviewed crossed broad aesthetic, thematic and media boundaries and serves as a testament to the diversity in expressive perspectives that exist across a geographic region often portrayed monolithically. The multifaceted nature of the 2025 Midwest Regional is a testament the importance of spotlighting individual experiences amongst a collective regional frame, but also to highlight the incredible creative traditions and contemporary practice alive and well in America’s Midwest. 

Selected from a pool of over 400 entries, the 65 accepted works in this exhibition demonstrate a high standard of execution across traditional and non-traditional modes of creative production and an innovative use of materials, surface texture and negative space. While there was no predetermined theme for this exhibition, my creative interests in identity and our relationship with the physical spaces and land we occupy is present as conceptual through-thread. Across the exhibition, themes of personal, familial and community identity and traditions are present across figurative works of drawing and painting as well as across abstract collage and sculpture. The varied relationships we have with the spaces and cities we occupy and identify with can be seen in rendered suburban and urban landscapes, narrative photography, as well as across works of sculpture where familiar domestic objects are repurposed, subverted and recast through a new lens. Lastly, our idolatry of, dependence upon and, at times, fraught relationship with land is captured through works of photography, printmaking, fiber, ceramic, sculpture and works where the physical materials of land: wood, ore, dirt, stone, frost, clay are repurposed, at times unrecognizably, as both creative medium as well as integral to the creative process. In engaging with this thematic lens and the incredible work across this exhibition, I encourage the audience to slow down, to engage with works as individuals and to consider how the material and conceptual diversity both redefine and more truthfully reflect our vast collective regional identity.

2025 Artists

Heidi Bailey, Theodore Barlow, Allyn Boley, Adam Boyle, Jules Briggs, Hannah Burnworth, Crystalyn Campos, Karen Dawson, Jon Detweiler, Emily Dormier, Atefeh Farajolahzadeh, Jimmy Fisher, Adam Freeland, Katherine Fries, Emma Gatzulis, Chet Geiselman, Charles Gick, Emily Hayden, Cullen Houser, John Hrehov, Mike Huffman, Beth Iserman, Jaxson Kidd, Merrill Krabill, Ruth Lantz, Ellen Leigh, Braydon Letsinger Howard Leu, Yuming (Griffin) Liu, Valerie Mann, Thomas Moberg, Alyssa Parr, Abbey Peters, Michele Pollock, Elizabeth Rose, Sonya Schuessler, Tom Sherbondy, Wendi Smith, Gregory Steel, Kailey Stockburger, Jon Swenson, Jamie Weinfurter, Heidi Weiss, Blake Williams, Michelle Westmark Wingard, Eileen Woods

About the Juror

Whitney Lea Sage is a multidisciplinary artist and educator originally from metro-Detroit currently serving as Assistant Professor of Art at North Central College in Naperville, IL. Whitney earned an MFA in Studio Art from the Sam Fox School of Visual Art at Washington University in St. Louis in May, 2011. Whitney also earned a BFA in Studio Art: Painting and a BS in Art Education at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.

Whitney’s work, which includes practices of painting, drawing, sculpture, fibers and installation, has previously been featured in recent solo exhibitions at Buckham Gallery, the College of SouthernNevada, Indiana University East, Pump House Arts Center, Workhouse Arts Center, ROY G BIV and Ripon College. A selection of Sage’s recent work has been featured in notable group exhibitions at the Urban Institute of Contemporary Art, the Painting Center, Superfront LA Gallery, the Lexington Art League, the Muskegon Museum of Art, the Kennedy Art Museum and the Dennos Museum Center.

Whitney has been an artist-in-residence at the Vermont Studio Center, Studios Midwest, AIR Studio Paducah, Wave Pool, Millimetre Press and Popp’s Packing. Whitney’s creative work has been featured in a number of publications including Manifest Gallery’s INDA 14, Refract Journal, Hour Detroit Magazine, WomanArts Quarterly Journal, Newfound Journal, Maake Magazine, and the Post-Industrial Complex catalog, published by the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit as a survey of makers in theDetroit area.