When I started working on this piece, someone told me regional museums are places “where the frontdesk staff feels bad asking you for admission.” The joke suggests that the term “regional” is synonymous with “second-tier,” but it echoes a bias that several regional museum directors and curators have shared with me over the last few weeks: the term “regional” is restrictive and has disparaging undertones, but nonetheless make up the fabric of the American museum network.

 a regional museum, and what is their purpose? While it objectively means “museums with a regional focus,” the consensus among “coastal elites” and even some of the interviewees is that the term is almost pejorative, and it’s dismissive of the national and international impact of museums operating outside of major art hubs that contribute to the $50 billion American museum sector (an average annual figure, according to the American Alliance of Museums).

In my experience working in art media, specifically in a hybrid print and digital news-based publication, regional museums would normally only merit coverage when there was a deaccessioning scandal, a notable acquisition, an inauguration with a star architect spearheading the project, or a disaster. There were some exceptions for art destinations, projects with an activist bent, and lighter pieces during the summer slowdown, but our general editorial strategy was based on the fact that more than 90% of our readers were in London, New York, Los Angeles, or Hong Kong—so why should they care?

The museum directors and curators I interviewed for this piece (unfortunately we could not include them all) joined me in attempting to unpack the meaning of the term. We also explored each of their institutions’ outsized contributions to American art, and their impact on communities near and far.

One overarching theme: regional museums were often born out of the need to preserve and promulgate the arts and culture of marginalized communities, and have origin stories rooted in activism. The Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian in Santa Fe, for example, was co-founded in 1937 by the Navajo medicine-man Hosteen Klah and the Boston shipping heiress Mary Cabot Wheelwright as tensions over religious oppression loomed over tribal-federal relations. Wheelwright, who came to New Mexico in 1918 and experienced several Navajo ceremonies, envisioned that the institution, founded as the ​​Museum of Navajo Ceremonial Art, would support Navajo communities in safekeeping traditions that could disappear within generations.

The Wheelwright’s director, Henrietta Lidchi, tells 

 that the founding of the Wheelwright “represents a historic political reorientation toward Indigenous communities, or a corrective to the extractive tendencies of state or federal institutions.”

She adds, “We exist within a specific region, so the Wheelwright, and the other surrounding network of museums dedicated to the Indigenous people of New Mexico, was created to provide communities access to their own heritage.”

The museum has been responsive to change over the years, repatriating its Navajo ceremonial collection to the Navajo Nation in the 1970s to rebrand as a contemporary Indigenous art museum, becoming one of the first to exhibit some then-emerging artists like Harry Fonseca. In addition to a vast anthropological research archive, which includes more than 2,000 recordings of Navajo ceremonial chants collected in the 1930s and 1940s by Wheelwright and Klah, the museum holds a 12,000-piece collection with extensive holdings of Indigenous contemporary art, a demographic that remains under-represented in non-regional museum collections.

“The growth of an institution is often measured as capital growth, rather than intellectual or cultural growth, and putting them into categories further limits their historical relevance from being properly understood,” Lidchi says, “The term ‘regional museum’ is difficult to define because these are places of memory and historic importance that do not fit one general description. The truth is that smaller and older institutions are often underappreciated or eclipsed by the more dominant contemporary art spaces on both the regional and international level.”

Over in the midwest, the late heiress and philanthropist Ruth De Young Kohler II elevated the John Michael Kohler Arts Center (JMACK) in Sheboygan, Wisconsin from a small nonprofit to an internationally-renowned museum while she served as director between 1972-2016. Pouring much of her fortune into building the museum’s collection, she is credited with having discovered the work of the then-unknown Wisconsin artist Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, acquiring more than six thousand works by the artist shortly after his death, and supported other local self-taught artists like James Tellen, who over 15 years created an expansive sculpture garden in the woods just south of the city that is preserved by the JMACK.

But while these and other cornerstones of the museum’s collection come from immediate “regional” sources, its acquisition focus, programming and initiatives now have a global scope. It has also launched projects that would not exist anywhere else, like the Art Preserve, a separate $40 million museum and research center that houses a 25,000-piece collection dedicated to artist-built environments, some from other regions of America.

“The term ‘regional’ limits the exposure and dialogues that we want to have, so I would disagree that it aligns with us​​—unless regional means community-focused, then of course we are a regional museum,” says the JMACK’s director, Amy Horst, “Our mission is to make this work nationally and internationally relevant while also providing connection points for our regional audiences, or explaining to them why this space exists here.”

Unlike museums with a specific niche, regional contemporary art spaces seem to have a harder time finding their footing on a national scale. They are primarily non-collecting institutions that are perpetually changing with the incoming of each director or curator. For example, the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art (UMOCA) in Salt Lake City was little-known outside of the region until the arrival of curator Aaron Moulton in 2012, who organized the 

 in 2013—an acclaimed one-off exhibition that sought to “re-imagine the possibilities and relevance of regionalism within an ever-globalizing perspective on contemporary art and cultural production,” Moulton said at the time.

The show shot UMOCA to international fame, applauded for its unique approach to examining the artistic manifestations of the spirituality and mythology of the region. The same year, while the exhibition was still on, Moulton announced he would be leaving UMOCA and later joined Gagosian in Los Angeles. Then came Rebecca Maksym, who originally joined as an interim curator and less than three years later was replaced by Jared Steffensen, a native Utah artist and former registrar at the museum.

“We’re constantly asking ourselves: well, we’re not New York and we’re not Los Angeles, so what are we? I feel like we’re always getting closer to dialing that in, but another curator could bring in different ideas,” Steffensen says. “The curators before me and I have all had very different approaches—in my practice, I do tend to focus on the artists that we have in the region.”

Steffensen helped develop the museum’s first artist-in-residence program, which provides local artists a year-long studio and financial support, and organized the exhibition 

, a survey of 30 artists that hopes to build on the success of the 

. “It’s obvious that people don’t tend to stay in Utah—there’s clearly more opportunities outside of the state,” he says, “So we’re trying to figure out how we can build community and also provide more opportunities for artists who are already here.”

The Nevada Museum of Art (NMA) in Reno, which has seen meteoric growth over the last few years, has carved a niche in works dealing with art and the landscape, with some significant holdings from its collection related to art made in and around the Great Basin, like Michael Heizer’s 

. The museum reached a milestone in 2009 when it established the Center for Art + Environment, a first-of-its-kind research department and archive collection that houses more than 12,000 artworks by over 500 international artists.

“Regional museums don’t typically have the resources to become comprehensive research centers,” says the Center’s director, William Fox, previously an independent scholar working as a researcher at the Getty Research Institute, “I was told the 

 had toured various places around the world, there were curators following the idea of art in the environment, and the education team of the museum was likewise fascinated by the idea and interested in making programs about it, so I was asked to help them figure out how to do that, and it worked.”

When plans for a Las Vegas branch of the museum were scrapped amid the pandemic, the NMA continued with its expansion master plan which also included a $60 million construction and endowment project for the Reno campus to give the museum enhanced galleries, research spaces, and storage facilities. As the only accredited art museum in Nevada, and the only art museum serving a state of over three million people, the NMA hopes the expansion will provide the public better access to educational programs and to its world-class collection and research archive, which spans more than 1.5 million pieces and continues to grow exponentially in geographic scope.

The 50,000-square-feet expansion broke ground earlier this year and is expected to open in 2025. “It was crucial because the most important work that has been done on the art and environment anywhere in the world is contained within the walls of around five regional museums, including ours,” Fox says, “It’s not being done by the Met​​—not because they are hostile to it, but because they have a much different encyclopedic charge than we do.”

He adds, “I don’t think that a museum necessarily has to be an attempt to bring all the centuries of art into an easily accessible place. If it’s going to work well, it has to be more focused, usually. If you have a focus, you can become the best at that focus in the world and people will come to you—even if you’re in a place like Nevada.”

Gabriella Angeleti

What Is a Regional Museum? 

2020 was probably the most stabilizing year of my life. I moved from New York to Portland in January, and serendipitously escaped living through the worst of the pandemic in my Bushwick apartment and instead stayed rent free at my mom’s house tending her garden and interning at a nearby veggie farm. There were no jobs and barely any freelance work, but I was on unemployment so I had the privilege to day dream and start my own magazine highlighting West Coast art that’s about to celebrate its third year anniversary. And, in the few blissfully unaware weeks before lockdown hit, I started meeting people in the Portland art community who made me realize this city is exactly where I want to be.

In those first weeks, I immediately got the sense that Portland was doing what the art world writ large kept saying it should do: experiment, take risks, acknowledge your past failures, support your community. The difference between Portland and my experience in New York is that Portland lacked the transactional, quid-pro-quo element in almost every interaction I’ve encountered. Instead, there’s a real sense of prioritizing collective support and care. It’s not always successful, mostly because of lack of funding and interest from the mainstream media and culture, but that doesn’t stop the art community from continuously trying, reinventing, and adapting. It makes for a fascinating scene with more great art than mediocre or bad, more friends than foes or frenemies, and a place overflowing with potential.

My six years of living in New York was mostly an experience of the art world’s self-obsessed, gate-keeping nepotism, which made Portland both a delightful and frustrating change. The scene is small, close knit, and supportive. It can also be wary of outsiders, provincial, and slow to change. I was excited to learn about Portland’s deep history of art and traditional crafts that make it an unsung art powerhouse. I missed out on some of the spaces that were important parts of regional arts history and identity because they closed before I arrived, like the 

, and ephemeral but impactful artist-run spaces like 

Jordan Schnitzer, head of the Schnitzer Family Foundation plus several art museums and institutions around the state, spoke with me about the effects of the pandemic on local arts.He acknowledged the totality of the financial devastation caused by the pandemic but added, “It gave artists a lot of time for contemplation. Our daily patterns changed; we sat down to write, read, and organize our lives more. I think it helped artists access inspiration and realize goals.” These are unprecedented times in all industries and I’ve been extremely fortunate to witness new and reimagined projects come into being.

Despite the fact that I may have missed important moments in regional history, they haven’t been forgotten. People in the local art community are amateur historians in their own right; I have no trouble finding people to tell me stories about what came before and how it relates to what’s going on now.

The relationship between Portland’s past and possible future takes center stage at 

 in the downtown Pearl District. Powered by the team behind Don’t Shoot PDX—an arts and education organization that promotes social justice and civic participation—The Black Gallery recently moved into the space previously occupied by 

, a contemporary art gallery with an innovative shareholder business model. Don’t Shoot PDX and HOLDING were longtime collaborators, producing two exhibitions each year, and this newest evolution demonstrates the art community’s commitment to making space for underrepresented voices in a historically racist city and state.

Teressa Raiford, Founder of Don’t Shoot PDX and Director of The Black Gallery explained that the downtown Portland gallery space became vacant when HOLDING decided to move to an online format. Because of Don’t Shoot’s years of collaboration with HOLDING, it was a natural fit for them to take over with a new programming. “Considering our organization’s displacement during Covid, we figured moving into an art space and connecting with a community would give us a platform to continue the work we do to drive social change. We found it very important for us to promote history, art, and Black culture.”

The Black Gallery is both Black-owned and -curated, and focuses on promoting arts and education as a way to build community and support activist voices. The Black Gallery just concluded their first exhibition, 

Hip Hop Lives: 50 Years of Art, History, and Culture

, featuring works by Julian V.L. Gaines, Hahnemühle William Turner, and a collaboration between The Skateroom and the Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Their future programming promises to be a range of artists whose work addresses social justice issues and explores themes of identity, culture, and history, an essential addition to a region with a violently racist and anti-Black history

Another generative reimagining of Portland’s spaces comes from curator Jess Nickel and her migrating 

. Instead of having a fixed, physical location, Nickel approaches real estate developers and property management companies and asks to utilize vacant spaces to curate art exhibitions. Nickel asks for the gift of the vacant space and in exchange the developers build cultural capital in their space, “Not every developer or management company sees the value in this exchange, but so far those that do have expressed nothing but positive feedback,” said Nickel. “As with all exchanges, it takes mutual trust and respect for everyone to feel positive about the experience.”

Despite the ravenous and seemingly unstoppable development of Portland and cities around the country, there is an appreciation for the campy history of the place. The Portland Art Museum's Center for an Untold Tomorrow (PAM CUT), a charmingly verbose name for their theater, performing, and ephemeral arts arm, is launching a new space later this year in an abandoned X-rated movie theater. Originally built as architect Isaac Geller’s 1925 vaudeville theater, the 

will serve as a model, both locally and globally, for the future of media arts and cinema.

“Cinematic storytelling, like artists and audiences, comes in all varieties and flavors. With the Tomorrow, we’re building a home for cultural snackers, a space where when people walk through this door, they will never quite know exactly what Tomorrow brings,” said PAM CUT Director Amy Dotson. “By creating a space where artists collaborate across disciplines, audiences co-mingle and are exposed to a variety of art and media stories folks; they will never have the same experience twice.”

The most expansive gesture toward international conversations landed in the Rose City this August with the kick off of 

’s 2023 programming. Curated by Christian-Viveros Fauné under the theme 

, the biennial features over fifteen exhibitions and programs across the city throughout the fall and winter. “The art being made in Portland and elsewhere in Oregon is beyond world class,” said Viveros-Fauné. The Converge 45 team plans to celebrate regional art by putting it in conversation with artists who have greater name recognition and creating a framework that demonstrates the connections between them.

Still, what I appreciate most about his approach is the understanding that much of Portland isn’t used to this type of programming and Vivero-Fauné is taking that into consideration: “The challenge of 'ennials is always to connect the local with the global across as many disciplines and groups of people as possible: artists, institutions, funders, sponsors, curators, staff, critics, writers, etc. One wants to do this organically, so when the exhibition arrives it doesn't feel like an alien spaceship crash landed on the city and took off again. Putting on a multi-venue exhibition like Converge 45 is about raising the bar on local culture and local cultural producers in Portland, but also about showing bigger cities that don't do global biennials how it's done.”

Converge 45, like all worth-while experiments, is bound to be full of successes, failures, and plenty of learning opportunities. Portland, almost as a rule, loves to get weird and take risks, which makes it an ideal location for this type of programming. Just look at what’s going on at the Lloyd Center, the massive shopping mall that was abandoned during the pandemic has since been taken over by 

Samuel Beckett play performed in an abandoned Victoria’s Secret

The art world in the US and internationally can learn from Portland. It’s one of the last (relatively) affordable, actually cool cultural hubs in the country—maybe 

 last? That means many artists can afford studio spaces and the cost of living isn’t suffocating (read: there’s no sales tax in Oregon). There is a small, but very strong gallery scene, and a small, but very strong independent art institution scene. The museums are struggling for relevance, but they’re working on it. What some might say is a financial underperformance is also the deeply anti-capitalist culture that celebrates no-holds-barred risk taking, somewhat funded by institutional and government bodies. There aren’t many blue-chip collectors locally, but gallerists know how to work around that.

Portland can act as a model for smaller US cities working to become cultural centers and uplift their art communities, as well as larger cities that need to reconnect with their cultural identity and dissolve a hyper-capitalist, inhumane model.

As Schnitzer told me, “There are many things Portland is not, but there are so many things that it is.” It’s a region as lousy with volcanoes as it is with rigorous artists and art workers, and I plan to be here for a very long time.

Amelia Rina

Weird, Risky, Rigorous: Why I Love Portland Art

“A great nation deserves great art.” This was the thinking that led to the founding of the National Endowment for the Arts back in 1965. Though many people don’t know it, over the past fifty years a handful of regional arts organizations have helped this federal agency work toward its mission. These six Regional Arts Organizations cultivate and invest in the unique cultural assets of each of the regions across our vast country, but more dedicated efforts and support are needed.

South Arts, originally the Southern Arts Federation when it was incorporated in 1975, joins Arts Midwest, Mid Atlantic Arts, Mid-America Arts Alliance, the New England Foundation for the Arts, and WESTAF to make up the US Regional Arts Organizations (RAO). As an intermediary between the NEA and the state arts agencies in their respective regions, each RAO serves as an independent nonprofit, addressing the various needs of their communities, from supporting individual artists, to improving cultural infrastructure, to establishing partnerships with philanthropies and funders of all sizes.

A great nation deserves great art. This is what that looks like from the South.

The South’s region, according to the Census Bureau, is now home to the largest population and is also the fastest growing part of the country. Ask anyone in our nine-state direct service area (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee) and they will tell you that they have seen many people move to their town, city, county, or state during the pandemic. And much of the migration we are seeing to the region is not just from within other parts of the United States—it’s coming from immigration that continues to enrich our cultural diversity.

What does migration mean for culture? This isn’t the first time that people have moved from one region to another; periods such as the Great Migration are particularly significant in the history of the South and our nation as Black people brought their traditions, culture, and art up the Mississippi and across the U.S. As those from our region migrated, they brought with them the arts, cultures, and ideas that are now seen as quintessential American forms: jazz, blues, Southern gothic literature, foodways, and other key touchstones from our region have become key to America’s cultural identity.

While the South has always had an abundance of homegrown creativity and culture, we are seeing art outside of the region’s established capitals, such as Memphis, Nashville, and New Orleans. Through our Jazz Road initiative—which directly funds jazz artists’ tours across the nation—we’ve worked with revitalized jazz clubs in places like Birmingham, AL and Durham, NC. These new and expanded venues and festivals provide an opportunity for cross-pollination between local and touring artists.

When recently speaking with our board of directors at their meeting in Charleston, SC during the Spoleto Festival, the jazz critic and curator Larry Blumenfeld shared that, “While we always used to measure culture solely in terms of New York and the major cultural institutions on both coasts (and maybe DC or Chicago), that landscape has changed. Those power centers no longer occupy the same space, especially since COVID and especially for anyone under 40. And this is a moment when the South, which has always been a source, especially for music, can be a renewed center for artist development, outreach and thinking about arts.”

A prime example of this trend in the visual arts is ArtFields, which annually showcases up to 400 works of art from Southern artists in the rural town of Lake City, South Carolina. Beginning in 2013, thousands of visitors travel to Lake City every year to see art by some of the South’s leading artists. Its mission: to “celebrate Southern art and revitalize our small town through the arts.”

This fall, South Arts is proud to partner with ArtFields on 

, an exhibition of works by artists who are previous award recipients of the ArtFields Competition and South Art’s Southern Prize and State Fellowships for Visual Arts since it began in 2017. The exhibition, occupying over 32,000 square feet of gallery and renovated warehouse spaces, is one of the largest exhibitions of Southern contemporary art in recent memory. It opens September 23 and runs all fall. You should come visit.

Access to cultural opportunities is essential to our mission of advancing Southern vitality. While South Arts embraces an equity lens across all our programs, we also have several programs with a particular equity focus, such as the National Leaders of Color Fellowship network (which is a partnership of all the RAOs) and Southern Cultural Treasures (SCT), a multi-year program through which 17 BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) led and serving organizations receive unrestricted operating grants and capacity building support.

The organizations in the SCT cohort do a variety of things—they are producing theaters, museums, and touring companies, for example. Many are found in the South’s major cities, but others are in rural areas. One, for example, is in a town in Mississippi with a population of less than 5,000 people. This organization—Sipp Culture—utilizes food, personal and community narrative, and a generative collective history of place to advance comprehensive community cultural development to reimagine a 21st Century rural infrastructure based on principles of self-determination, production, and sustainability. This work could not happen in a large city, in the South or elsewhere, and that’s part of what makes it so special.

The SCT initiative helps each of the 17 organizations reach self-defined success, as they know best what they need to do. Ultimately, 14 funders including the Ford Foundation, our first partner for this project, contributed $6.7 million over three years to make this happen. When you look at overlap between

culture and social activism in the South over the years, centering access and equity becomes all the more important.

And yet, for all that the South has contributed culturally over the history of the country, our arts sector has been traditionally under-funded compared to other parts of the country. This is both an internal and an external problem. National funders don’t tend to look here, and five of our nine member states allocate less than $1 per capita to public arts funding. Most of the foundations in the South have a local service area, so despite the impact of and need for regional initiatives, there are few ways to fund them. Additionally, few national foundations, especially those with a focus on supporting the arts, are based in the South.

Investments in Southern art and culture have been and continue to be greatly needed. Many of the organizations in the South are grassroots and small and are now facing the challenge of serving larger and more diverse communities. Individual artists have few places to turn for support, and when there’s a crisis, they find themselves in precarious circumstances.

But, there is tremendous opportunity for growth. And coupled with the growing understanding that Southern artists and organizations are doing world-class work, we believe that the region has limitless potential. From gospel to gumbo to Southern Gothic, time and again the South has influenced the culture of the entire country. So while yes, a great nation deserves great art, most great art doesn’t just appear on a national level. Its support requires a closer, regional nurturing of the individuals and communities who make it happen.

Susie Surkamer

Arts Funding, as Seen from the South 

What comes first—a thriving local art scene or the outlets that deem it such? We consulted the luminaries behind regional arts publications across the country to try and answer this chicken-or-the-egg question. Founder, Publisher, and Editor-in-Chief of 

 (Los Angeles, CA), Executive Director of 

(Detroit, MI), and Founder and Editor-in-Chief of the

(Boston, MA) joined us for a roundtable discussion over Zoom on June 5, 2023.

This resulted in a bigger conversation about “regionality,” which establishes our interlocutors’ initiatives squarely in their geographic locations and in service of their local communities. But these publications are also interested in bringing regional news to a more global audience. Their efforts come at a critical time. The gutting of local news has profoundly impacted the state of art criticism. According 

, the U.S. lost more than 360 local newspapers between late 2019 and the end of May 2022. More than a fifth of Americans now live in news deserts, with limited access to local news and, concordantly, lack of access to arts coverage. The past decade, however, has seen a rapid growth of regional arts publications, populating these deserts like oases of hope for a healthier and hardier media landscape in the future.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

What does ‘regionality’ mean to you? Is it defined by geography? Cultural ecosystems? Lindsay, why don’t we start with you, seeing as some may argue that Los Angeles, with its recent growth as an international art hub, does not qualify as a ‘regional’ setting?

I think the regionality is definitely a geographic thing, but it also has to do with a particular ethos—here, it’s an ethos of experimentation. Also, thinking back to the history of art and artists here in LA, while we do write about contemporary art, we still always have an eye towards what came before and the histories before us. And I think the regionality has to do also with just sort of a pride of place, of being in LA and having a really specific voice. I mean, all the cities represented here are very diverse, and I think that makes it an interesting challenge, as an art publication, to really collapse all of that diversity into one place and to celebrate it.

Growing up in the suburbs of Detroit, there was not a lot of pride in the city. I was influenced by that; it caused me to have a lack of appreciation for Detroit at a young age. Before going to the College for Creative Studies, the art school in Detroit, I looked at every other college you could possibly imagine to get out of the city. I was thinking, “I can’t be here; there’s no way that it’s going to be a good thing for me to stay in the city for my career as an artist.” But then I ended up staying at CCS, and I just fell completely in love with the city. I realized that it has such a rich history and such a rich contribution to the local communities as well as so many other places around the world. It has been so easy for that stuff to be forgotten, even by the people who are here, because of a lack of coverage or discussion about it.

 It’s being in the epicenter of something vastly overlooked. It’s about maintaining that tension between the audience and the art market as a commercial entity. And, of all things, it’s the spaces and institutions that exist more for the people and having to make that difference. This creates a need to remind people that the only people who can truly tell a narrative are those who inhabit it.

I’ve been asked this question before: the idea of “regionality” is one of the barriers 

 butts up against. It’s not anything to do with the support of the local community, our ability to find good writers, or our ability to write about good art happening—or anything to do with our work and coverage. Instead, I feel like we are fighting against the national perception of Texas as a place. When you look at the news coming out of our state, it’s about conservative politics, or it’s about a hurricane completely decimating a city’s infrastructure with entirely inequitable consequences based on the inherent problems that are inherent to the city’s history. It’s these tragedies that make for really good national news because they’re sensational; you can look at Texas and think, “Wow, look how messed up that state is.”

But those of us who live in Texas know that it’s so vibrant and that there’s so much community. Cities like Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio are extremely diverse in every sense of the word. I mean, Houston has one of the best food scenes in the country. You could divide our state into five different states, and they would each have drastically different policies. But when you think about something as a homogenized group, as so much of the national press does when looking at Texas, it’s hard to see any complexity and even harder to prompt any conversation about the arts in Texas. That’s not what anyone elsewhere cares about. Even if our myriad art scenes can stand up against art that is happening anywhere else.

 It feels like Boston sabotages its own art scene. The city has a really rich history of punk and DIY music, but it’s been totally dormant because the cops shut down basement shows, and then people got bummed about it and didn’t want to do it again. When I was in college, everyone called Boston “Bummer City.” There’s even a jokey website that’s called 

. People in Boston love to hate on Boston. That’s been something that we at the magazine have been trying to combat and rally people around and be like, “No, you guys, there’s so much happening here.” And yeah, the housing sucks, the healthcare sucks; but that happens in so many cities, and artists are getting priced out of cities everywhere.

To try to switch the narrative to show people what is actually happening here has been difficult. We also are a city where nearly a quarter of our population are students that come here and leave in the summers, and then leave permanently after four years, and so there’s this transience about. Lack of institutional memory is really, really an issue here. I’m loving hearing from all of you because I think we all share a desire to hold an archive for and give space to voices that define these little pockets and neighborhoods, and moments, creating a snapshot of the places that we love and care about. It’s our own love letters to our cities and regions. But getting other people to understand your love letters can be really difficult.

There is a concern that people here don’t really recognize Detroit as a relevant place to be. I have heard the term “brain drain” being thrown around a lot in the city because we have seen intellectuals and great artists leaving the city as soon as they get their degrees to find a place that’s maybe a little bit more stimulating for them, or that has a clearer track for career growth. A lot of really amazing thinkers have stayed, but we’ve also lost a lot.

 Anybody. Our interim editor, Courtney, teaches at Georgia State. I got to sit in on her class months ago, and she said something really interesting, which was that for a lot of these students, university is the first time they’re going to understand that there’s such a thing as contemporary art. She told me if it were not for her reading 

 in her senior year of high school, she would not have even thought that she could go to school for it. On a regional level, especially in the South, it just informs the narratives we employ to connect people with art in ways that they would not imagine. So that’s why I say almost anyone. If you’re interested in it or open to it, we’re here for you.

 We follow much of that same mindset. You have to have a vague, passing interest in art. I am not necessarily a believer in the magical thinking that an art review could spark an interest in someone who hates art and make them start loving it. Whenever I talk with new writers, I tell them that whenever I write, I try to write for my mother. I didn’t grow up in an art family. We didn’t go to art museums. I discovered art through art history in high school, which brought me to where I am today. But I still try to write for my mother, with the intent that she’d be able to fully comprehend what’s going on. I’m not referencing Foucault in every other sentence. Instead, I explain what’s going on in the art, how I’m experiencing it, and why it is doing whatever it’s doing. But at the same time, I want to write so that all of the industry people reading 

 I love that. I’ve literally written an entire letter from the editor about writing for my mom. Writing with an accessible tone is paramount as an accessibility measure. Avoiding the art speak. Hierarchical language that is very limiting to its audience and has a self-importance around it. It also makes the writing better. As I’m editing, highlighting a sentence and saying, “Okay, let’s take out the theory here, and what are you actually saying? How can you delete these art-y words and use normal words here?”


The audience can be the array of the art world, from students who might just be learning about art to artists, collectors, art workers, curators. And because we’re free and we distribute around the city at, I think, now over 100 art spaces, people that might be going to a gallery for the first time can pick up a copy. And it becomes almost like a discovery of the art world. There’s a potential for it to be sort of an access point for people, which is really exciting to me.

We’re also translating our issues into Spanish now, taking into consideration the specific needs of Los Angeles. I mean, so much of America is Spanish-speaking, and Los Angeles is about 40% Spanish-speaking.

 We’ve been translating select articles into Spanish for the past four years. It’s been a great exercise to just try and find new audiences and to work with translators, and it’s long overdue.

Do you all think about things diasporically? People are reading Burnaway in New York, LA, Chicago, and Portland, but also in Berlin, Lagos, São Paulo. It becomes really apparent that we also need to talk about people from these regions, make those connections, and show how our cultures mix together. Down here, it’s a lot about Hip-Hop. If it weren’t for Atlanta and Miami and New Orleans and Houston, if it weren’t for those sounds, the country would have nothing to listen to.

 We think about this a lot. There are a ton of artists that have come out of Texas—that either went to graduate school here or were born here and had formative years here—that aren’t recognized as being “Texas artists.” Or, artists who are based here and show internationally but aren’t recognized as being Texas artists when they’re shown elsewhere. You’ll always see that someone is a Brooklyn-based artist, an LA-based artist, or a Berlin-born artist. But if someone is from Texas, they’re never a Houston-born artist; instead, they’re a Brooklyn-based artist.

Discovery: How do local demographics factor into how your publications function?

: Our audience is primarily artists, which I love. Boston does not have a huge market or collector base. Most of the people here are affiliated with a university or an institution in some way. Despite that, we really try to bridge the gap between coverage and criticism and find the sweet spot where we are not using artspeak and jargon. We want the publication to be something that both a professor can pick up and engage with and also a student for whom this might be the first time engaging with contemporary art.

When we were making the first couple of issues of 

, I was going around and talking to everyone that I could, saying, “I have this idea. We’re working on this. What do you think?” I mean, truly, all the time. And there was one person who I spoke with, and I talked to her about how we were doing an interview with Nick Cave, and we also had some super emerging artists who had their first project out in the world.” And she was like, “You’re going to put those people in the same issue?” And I was like, “Yeah, we’re all in the same system.”

.: I would say in any given year, we, of course, have a significant readership from all across Texas. But we also have a not-insignificant readership from the rest of the US. I think part of it is that we’ve been around for 22 years. We have a backlog of content that people can find just by Googling artists’ names.

What you were saying, Jameson, about merging types of coverage resonated with me. We’ll publish something about a Yayoi Kusama installation that was just purchased by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the next day, we’ll publish an article about a small gallery show in Laredo. Because of this mix of content—of known and lesser-known artists and art spaces— we have this backlog of content that readers can access, and a lot of readers end up seeing that content in addition to reading articles that came out in the last week. Our audience also includes a portion of international readers.

Discovery: Let’s talk about sustainability—

: It’s been really top of mind since we’re in the midst of this transition to a nonprofit. Until now, we’ve been pretty much exclusively funded via advertising. That speaks to us being in LA, where there is an art market here that is large enough to support that. Our vision now, as we’re becoming a nonprofit, leans on our membership program called 

, where we’re really inviting the public to join as a member, which includes things like a 

 subscription. We’re doing member events like studio visits with artists. But until recently, we really didn’t ask the public for support in any meaningful way. And so this is a huge light bulb moment for me, is you need to signal that you need support from the community and communicate in an effective way.

Generally, we’re looking at the future, in terms of funding and sustainability, through the lens of advertising, membership, and grants. Until now, we’ve been operating as an LLC, which means that most grants were not available to us, and that has largely fuelled the decision to become a nonprofit.

: I’ve always just done whatever I wanted to and funded it myself. Starting in the second year, I introduced advertising into the printed copies of the book, and that went quite well. I probably sold about eight ads for that issue, which funded about half of the cost of the printed books. That was really great and exciting. But now I’m into the third year, I’m trying to solicit those advertisers again, and some are less responsive. You’ve got to remind these people: “Hey, I’ve been writing about your gallery shows all year. I’m not going to be able to do this if I don’t get this support from you.” I’m asking for between 150 and 250 bucks for an ad.

: I know, but even that, it’s just Detroit is so... There’s just not any money for art here. It’s very, very sad. I feel bad even asking for it, but it’s just what I need to do. There’s no other way.

: We are vital pieces of the art ecosystems in each of our cities; they need you, and they rely on your work. Our writing fuels the scene and, to be frank, often fuels sales for these galleries too. We are a vital piece of this community, and they need you. Communicating that as diplomatically as possible is really important.

: You know, I’m almost considering making a poster that says something like, “We need you, you need us. Come on, let’s go.” Because it really is an ecosystem. But hey, if we’re gone one day because we can’t afford to keep doing it, then voila—now you don’t have really great art reviews written about your gallery shows.

. A couple of our advertisers emailed me and said that we should meet. I’m going, “Why should we meet?” And one of them was a little more transparent about it, no longer wanting to pay for advertising. So, I went back and pulled every review that we’ve done for the gallery in the past three years. I told them, “Look, this is an ecosystem we’re in. Everything that we do plays into it. If we are not covering what you’re doing, no one’s going to show up at your space. With the criticism that we provide, we are trying to drive this ecosystem in our regions and in our cities towards a healthy place, and with that comes change. Bottom line, if you don’t want to give us money, then there’ll be no one covering you again.”

: I don’t know if this is the same with you, Brandon, and in your region, but the galleries in our area have a really hard time making it, too. And so I’ve been in a position—Ashley, I’m sure you’ve been there—where the galleries who have supported and taken out advertising in

 are other women entrepreneurs who are running spaces. I’ll ask, “Abigail, what can you do?” And she’s like, “This year, I can do a $400 ad, and maybe next year I can do more.” And it’s always this give and take. And my response is always, “Anything. Anything is so helpful.” Going back to the original question of the funding, I looked to peers like Burnaway and decided really early on that we needed to be able to accept tax-deductible donations.

 for the first three and a half to four years of our work. And then we actually took over the nonprofit status of a defunct blog called 

, which came about in the early 2000s blog era and covered the Boston art scene. When I started looking into the nonprofit process, the volunteer lawyer that we had said, “There’s an organization you can take over; that’s the cheaper way to do it.” So that was the route that we took. To this day, we have not received a gift from an individual larger than $15,000. That is a fraction of what we need to even produce an issue.

And so we’re working now on adjusting our publishing cycle so that our team can take some time to actually focus on trying to make this sustainable. This will be the first summer in five years that I’m not making a print magazine, and I’m so excited.

Discovery: Since a lot of what your publications inadvertently do is create a record of your art communities, could each of you speak about the general observations you have made? What has the arc of its development and change been?

: As I mentioned earlier, LA is in such a moment right now. I started the magazine in 2015. It was around the time that Hauser and Wirth moved here. And in the eight years that I’ve run the magazine, now we have 

, and we have galleries from New York and all across the globe moving here. The market has grown a lot, but Los Angeles is still very much defined by its schools like UCLA, CalArts, and Otis Art Center.

Other galleries are arriving with a fresh perspective. But then there are the roots of Los Angeles: the history of LA, the artists who have studied here that are grounded in that. And I do think it’s more and more important to connect to the history of LA because there’s so much newness in the city.

.: But there’s always an article, once a year, about how LA’s art scene is really on the come-up.

: We’ve been here! But now there’s maybe more attention. And Detroit, same thing. I remember when I moved to Detroit, it was the new city to watch. Artists are moving from New York. Those things make national news. And it’s like… we’ve been here. But I also think the upside to all of this newness is that we are voices for these communities. People look to us to really represent what’s actually happening here. That, to me, is very exciting.

: Same. Every couple of years by a mix of civic boosterism and the film industry (we have this ridiculous tax credit, so a quarter of LA has moved to Atlanta), and, with Atlanta being cheaper than Miami now, folks are moving up here from Miami, so Miami is worrying about their scene because people are leaving. This new group coming in—they don’t know how much work went into making Atlanta Art Week happen. And so you get across the region, this constant of trying to manage and navigate and negotiate with the Southern-curious who come because it’s cheap and they bring what they bring. It was a little weird to see the UTA [United Talent Agency] target this market. So now, part of our work is just defending those artists that have promise while existing outside of these systems.

: In Boston, there’s been a huge change in support from the city. My background is in politics and policy. When I was an undergrad, I was obsessed with arts funding policy. And it’s been really interesting just in the past six years, where there have been huge shifts in how the city is involved with arts and culture. With that, I wish that 

 could do more reporting because there is so much that’s changing right now. But because of our bandwidth and lack of staff, it’s hard for us to be immediately responsive. Another really fabulous regional publisher, Jenna Crowder, who ran 

 in Portland, Maine, had a tagline for her publication, which was “Reveling in the Art of Slow Publishing.” And I think we revel in the art of publishing when we can.

Brandon Zech

Brandon Sheats

Ashley Cook 

Jameson Johnson

Lindsay Preston Zappas

The people behind six publications from across the U.S. on the challenges of working locally, pride of place, and the "art of publishing when you can." 

The Art of Publishing 

Issue 2 

When this issue first hits your inbox, we’ll be en route to Lake City, South Carolina for the opening of ArtFields, a town-wide exhibition of hundreds of works by southern artists. It’s a fitting occasion to launch an issue of the publication devoted to regionalism—whatever that means these days—and how art functions outside of the art world’s capital cities.

Far from being a diffuse shadow of the dominant ecosystems in places like New York, the lifecycle of contemporary art, from its funding, to its production and presentation, to its critical and public reception, only intensifies as it plays out in communities across the country. And though challenges are tougher, the rewards are greater.

There’s a larger conversation at play here, one which considers the role of arts and culture within the American project. But that will have to wait for a future issue. For now, we’re thrilled to present the perspectives of funders, exhibition-makers, and arts publishers as they survey the national arts landscape.

 follows the money. As the President and CEO of South Arts, one of the seven Regional Arts Organizations (RAOs) set up by the NEA in the 1970s, Surkamer devises strategies and programs of support for artists and arts organizations across nine states in the southeastern United States. How does one go about successfully funding in that region? Find out here.

considers the contested notion of the regional museum. Not just places “where the front desk staff feels bad asking you for admission,” as she was jokingly told while researching the piece, these institutions are often the first responders to the cultural crises of the day. More on that here.As to how presenting organizations interlock to create a local scene, 

 takes a look around Portland, Oregon, as the Converge 45 Biennial kicks off, with works by over 50 artists on display in private and public museums, galleries, project spaces, not to mention a shopping mall and the city’s Japanese Gardens.But what happens after the show goes down? For our regional arts publishing roundtable, we speak to the people behind arts publications across the country: Founder, Publisher, and Editor-in-Chief of 

, and Founder and Editor-in-Chief of the 

And to round off the issue, we present a special work by Sky Hopinka. 

 builds upon a lyrical fragment of Bob Dylan, allowing us to wander through this strange, beautiful country.

Discovery

by affidavit

Fall 2023

On Regionalism