When Lexi Bishop moved to Pittsburgh from Los Angeles in 2020, these were the mysteries before her. After working for Nino Mier in L.A. and Christie’s in New York City, Bishop had decided to open a new art space—here gallery—on Pittsburgh’s north side. Promoting exhibitions and coordinating with fellow gallerists in the city was challenging, however, because the city lacked the arts communication infrastructure which had buoyed her career in major metro markets.
After closing her gallery in 2024, Bishop turned her attention towards building the infrastructure she needed. The result is Middle Node—a gallery guide and regionally focused arts publication that launched in early May and aims to make artists and galleries visible in a suite of Rust Belt cities—Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit—as well as Pittsburgh. It distinguishes itself, in part, by being open to partnering with arts spaces and projects of any type: from commercial galleries to DIY spaces, pop-ups and happenings.
Nicole Capozzi of Pittsburgh’s BoxHeart Gallery sees this approach as an outgrowth of Bishop’s independent position. “It matters who builds these platforms because it shapes what gets recognized as part of the ecosystem in the first place,” she explains. “Pittsburgh has had institutional maps and guides before, but independent infrastructure exists outside those frameworks and simply hasn’t been included.”
Capozzi distinguishes between high-prestige, museum-type institutions and the independent infrastructure that offers funding, residencies and space to artists. It’s a distinction Natalie Sweet, executive director of Brew House Arts, has also observed, and she hopes Middle Node can bring attention to both, without losing what makes each unique: “Reduced fees for listings, support for users, and putting exhibitions from experimental spaces like Bunker Projects right alongside listings from commercial spaces like Concept Gallery, could help increase awareness without changing what those spaces are at their cores.”
More challenging, perhaps, is eroding the divide between cities. Middle Node places exhibitions in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit and Buffalo next to one another, as a prompt for artists and arts writers to think of those cities as interconnected. “These cities share similar struggles and similar infrastructure. There’s a tendency for the cities to work isolated from one another, with artists in one of those cities not even realizing they can show in the others,” Bishop says.
Those shared struggles can be a boon, offers Nando Alvarez-Perez, co-founder and co-director of the Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art, which is listing shows on Middle Node. “Artists in places like Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Cleveland—because of the challenges they’ve been facing over the last fifty years—may not always know exactly where to look for the future, but I do think they’re often carrying a lot less historical baggage and fewer institutional investments.”
Bill O’Driscoll, former arts editor for Pittsburgh City Paper and present arts and culture reporter for NPR affiliate WESA, says that he has “seen very little connection between Pittsburgh and those other cities,” in his 23 years on the scene. “One-offs at most. The only exception might be Silver Eye Center for Photography’s Radial Survey, a biennial that highlights artists living and working within 300 miles of Pittsburgh.”
Sweet hopes that “by giving Pittsburgh audiences a platform to learn about galleries and shows in these other cities, it could help to grow connections.”
Bishop anticipates that linking the cities will take work. Middle Node’s companion publication, which will launch under the editorial leadership of Paula Kupfer in the coming months, is part of that effort.
Patrick Totally, an artist in Pittsburgh, hopes Bishop and her collaborators will succeed, but worries that slow progress could prompt their return to major markets. “The Pittsburgh spaces that are getting the most press currently—like Romance Gallery and april april—feel somewhat speculative in nature,” he tells Observer. “I get the impression that these spaces (each operated out of spare rooms or inherited properties) are positioned to move back to New York City in a diminished form should their prospects in Pittsburgh fall through.”
(Margaret Kross of Romance Gallery clarifies that the gallery began in her living room, not a spare room, and has since moved to a rented space. Likewise, april april, run by Patrick Bova and Lucas Regazzi, occupies a rented storefront.)
Bishop shows no sign of leaving town, but does admit that her New York City and Los Angeles connections have lent her a certain cachet. Museum curators and foundation administrators have been more willing to meet with her because she has credentials they recognize, she suspects. “My first clients at here gallery were mostly people from out-of-town. It was easier to get coverage and press in New York because I already had connections there.” Those connections, she hopes, will continue to draw major city collectors to mid-size city galleries. In her experience, artists outside of the N.Y.C. and L.A. bubbles can seem “exotic” to collectors in those “major nodes.”
Alvarez-Perez hasn’t had that experience. “I don’t think Buffalo is viewed as being ‘exotic’ so much as it is viewed as being ‘parochial,’ which, in my personal experience talking to artists and arts professionals from New York City and Los Angeles, is kind of an inversion of the actual situation,” he tells Observer. “It seems so much of the larger art world is stuck in an intellectual time loop.”
Tara Fay Coleman, a performance artist in Pittsburgh who showed at Bishop’s gallery in 2023, hasn’t always found the “exotic” marker beneficial. “I have seen Pittsburgh referred to as sort of a hidden gem,” she says, “but the way it’s profiled still limits visibility for a lot of artists and collectives doing great things because they aren’t connected to some of the more well-known institutions.”
Whether or not Bishop’s elite connections will benefit local artists is yet to be seen, but even those who are skeptical find reason to hope. “Bishop has been exceedingly easy to work with,” Totally adds.
Coleman points out that Middle Node can only address some of the issues faced by performance artists in Pittsburgh. The city, she explains, lacks an audience for performance work which isn’t theatrical. “They expect staging, choreography, rehearsal, and movement, and when the work is more conceptual, people don’t always know how to read it. The lack of literacy around performance is a real barrier.”
For Centa Schumacher, a photographer, there’s also the question of why Pittsburgh doesn’t have much of a collector base of its own, and why it’s necessary to draw collectors from elsewhere: “I think there are enough people of means to support a healthy collecting community, but for one reason or another, so many people don’t see art as something worth dropping more than a couple hundred bucks on.”
By contrast, Wren Howison, who has been showing work in Pittsburgh for over two decades, sees N.Y.C. collectors as a yet-untapped market. “Last summer, one of my paintings made it to New York City for the first time,” she says. “That acquisition was a highlight.”
However Middle Node might reshape the fortunes of Rust Belt artists, the platform cannot be a solution to all the economic and cultural realities of making art in a mid-sized city. Still, Schumacher sees Middle Node as solving many of the problems both she and Bishop encountered when they moved here: “Having clear access to all the art spaces across the city eliminates a certain type of cultural gatekeeping, and I think that is particularly helpful for young artists or people new to the scene. I would have loved something like this when I first moved to the city.”
