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As a recent transplant to the region, Güiraldes brings a fresh perspective. It is notable that only 25 percent of the featured artists hail from Chicago, a city that has tended to dominate the New American Paintings Midwest issues over the years. Rosario’s selections are extremely diverse in terms of the artists’ backgrounds and aesthetic viewpoints. What strikes me most with this selection is the number of artists who are engaged with abstraction. Whether due to the prevailing winds of the art world, or the applicant pool, it has been a long time since an edition of New American Paintings has contained so much nonobjective work. Is this a sign of things to come?

Let me start by stating the obvious: on any given day, every conceivable type of painting is being made all over the world––from abstract painting to representational painting to types of painting that defy easy categorization. The fact that there has been a glut of representational painting, or, more specifically, figurative painting in recent years says more about the art market than it does the studio practices of artists worldwide. It also says something about just how institutionalized the art world has become as a younger generation of artists, many of whom hold an MFA degree, are in place to produce the work that the market suddenly wants. For many years, figurative painting was considered an outmoded means of expression that was given very little attention in the galleries and museums that, for all intents and…

It’s tough to identify a definitive starting point for the idea of the everyday as a focus in art; so many moments and movements are rooted in the immediate surroundings and regular activities of artists and their subjects, on the outwardly routine and the supposedly nothing-special. From pre-historic hunting images to seventeenth-century genre painting, from Pop art’s veneration of modern consumerism to conceptual art’s focus on all-too-familiar systems and procedures, the everyday has continued to provide both a forum for the exploration of complex formal and psychological themes, and a point of entry accessible even to viewers unfamiliar with art practice and its history. Closely linked to this notion is the exploration of belonging, of how we engage with or resist our milieus. The extent to which we mesh with our own personal everyday—the people and places around us—codifies our identity and shapes our conflicts.

In this issue of New American Paintings, the everyday—and the ways in which we belong to or feel alienated from it, most often by the communities to which we (voluntarily or involuntarily) belong—come to the fore. Perhaps this has something to do with a vision of the Midwest as ground zero for American egalitarianism, as a region in which the perception of coastal elitism might give way to a different sense of possibility. In the paintings of artist and designer Martyna Alexander, that potential is modeled as a drive to escape from dominant societal configurations. Representing the strictures of contemporary existence as grids and…