When Lexi Bishop moved to Pittsburgh from Los Angeles in 2020, these were the mysteries before her. After working for Nino Mier in LA and Christie's in New York City, Bishop had decided to open a new art space—here a gallery—on Pittsburgh's north side. Promoting exhibitions and communicating with other millers in the city was a challenge, however, because the city lacked the communication infrastructure for the arts that had developed his work in the larger municipal markets.
After closing his gallery in 2024, the Bishop turned his attention to building the infrastructure he needed. The result is Middle Node—a gallery guide and regionally focused art publication that launched in early May and aims to showcase artists and galleries in the Rust Belt metropolitan area—Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit—and Pittsburgh. It distinguishes itself, in part, by being open to collaboration with art spaces and projects of any kind: from commercial galleries to DIY spaces, fairs and events.
Nicole Capozzi of Pittsburgh's BoxHeart Gallery sees this approach as a result of Bishop's independent position. “It is important who builds these platforms because they shape what is known as part of the ecosystem from the beginning,” he explains. “Pittsburgh has had institutional maps and indexes in the past, but independent infrastructure exists outside of those frameworks and has not been included.”
Capozzi distinguishes between high-quality institutions, such as museums and private infrastructures that provide artists with funding, residences and space. It's a difference Natalie Sweet, executive director of Brew House Arts, has also noticed, and hopes that Middle Node can bring attention to both, without losing what makes each different: “Reduced costs of listing, user support, and putting exhibitions from experimental spaces like Bunker Projects right there and listings from commercial spaces like Concept Gallery, can help increase their awareness of the space.”
The biggest challenge, perhaps, is to eliminate the divide between cities. Middle Node places exhibitions in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit and Buffalo next to each other, as a way to prompt artists and art writers to think of those cities as interconnected. “These cities share the same struggles and the same infrastructure. There is a tendency for cities to work separately, artists in one of those cities don't even realize that they can be seen in others,” said Bishop.
Those shared struggles can be useful, offers Nando Alvarez-Perez, founder and director of the Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art, which lists exhibitions in the Middle Node. “Artists in places like Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Cleveland—because of the challenges they've faced over the past fifty years—may not always know where to look to the future, but I think they tend to carry less historical baggage and less institutional investment.”
Bill O'Driscoll, former arts editor of the Pittsburgh City Paper and current arts and culture reporter for NPR's WESA affiliate, says he's “seen very little connection between Pittsburgh and those other cities,” in his 23 years on the scene. “So many awards. The only one might be the Silver Eye Center for Photography's Radial Survey, which annually highlights artists who live and work within 300 miles of Pittsburgh.”
Sweet hopes that “by giving the Pittsburgh audience a platform to learn about the galleries and shows in these other cities, it can help increase communication.”
The Bishop expects that connecting the cities will work. The companion publication Middle Node, which will be launched under the editorial leadership of Paula Kupfer in the coming months, is part of that effort.
Patrick Totally, an artist from Pittsburgh, hopes that Bishop and his collaborators will succeed, but worries that the slow progress may cause them to return to the big markets. “Pittsburgh spaces that are getting a lot of press right now—like Romance Gallery and april—feel inherently speculative,” he told the Observer. “I get the impression that these places (each operating without spare rooms or legacy properties) are in a position to return to New York City in a diminished capacity if their opportunities in Pittsburgh pass.”
(Margaret Kross of Romance Gallery clarifies that the gallery started in her living room, not a spare room, and has moved into a rented space. Similarly, April by April, run by Patrick Bova and Lucas Regazzi, has a rented storefront.)
Bishop shows no signs of leaving the city, but admits that his connections to New York City and Los Angeles have lent him a certain cachet. Museum managers and foundation managers were very willing to meet with him because he has information they can see, he suspects. “My first clients in this gallery were mostly people from outside the city. It was easy to get information and press in New York because I already had contacts there.” That connection, he hopes, will continue to draw big-city collectors to downtown galleries. In his experience, artists outside the bubbles of NYC and LA can seem “strange” to collectors in those “big nodes.”
Alvarez-Perez never had that. “I don't think Buffalo is considered 'extraordinary' so much as it's considered 'parochial,' which, in my experience speaking to artists and art workers from New York City and Los Angeles, is a real reversal,” he told the Observer. “It seems like much of the art world is still stuck in an intellectual time loop.”
Tara Fay Coleman, a Pittsburgh-based artist who exhibited at Bishop's gallery in 2023, has never found the “rare” label to be beneficial. He says: “I've seen Pittsburgh referred to as a kind of hidden gem, but the way it's portrayed still limits the visibility of many artists and groups doing great things because they're not connected to some of the more well-known institutions.”
Whether local artists will benefit or not remains to be seen, but even the skeptics find reason to be optimistic. “Bishop was very easy to work with,” added Tolly.
Coleman points out that Middle Node can only address some of the issues facing performance artists in Pittsburgh. The city, he explains, does not have an audience for non-theatrical work. “They expect to stage, read and write, rehearse and move, and when the work is meaningful, people don't know how to read it often. Lack of literacy about performance is a real barrier.”
For Centa Schumacher, a photographer, there is also the question of why Pittsburgh does not have a large collector base, and why it is necessary to attract collectors from other areas: “I think there are enough people in the ways to support a healthy collecting community, but for one reason or another, many people do not see art as something worth throwing away more than a few hundred dollars.
In contrast, Wren Howison, who has been showing work in Pittsburgh for more than two decades, sees NYC collectors as an untapped market. “Last summer, one of my paintings came to New York City for the first time,” they told the Observer. “That purchase was outstanding.”
However Middle Node may reshape the fortunes of Rust Belt artists, the stage cannot be a solution to all the economic and cultural realities of making art in the middle city. Still, Schumacher sees the Middle Node as solving many of the problems he and Bishop encountered when they moved here: “Clear access to all art spaces throughout the city eliminates a kind of cultural preservation, and I think that's especially useful for young artists or young people in the area. I would have liked something like this when I moved to the city.”
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