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Over the course of two weeks, Stephanie meticulously reviewed more than five hundred submissions, ultimately selecting a diverse group of artists featured in this issue. While Chicago remains the cultural epicenter of the Midwest, it’s worth noting that only twenty-five percent of the chosen artists reside in the Windy City, reflecting a growing trend of artists building their practices outside major urban centers.

I am frequently asked about how artists are selected for New American Paintings, and it’s a topic I haven’t addressed in quite some time. From the publication’s inception, our jurying process has been entirely blind. This approach reflects the core values of the publication: We strive to minimize bias and ensure that all artists, regardless of gender, age, ethnicity, or career stage, have an equal opportunity to be featured. Jurors are only given visual materials: four images of each artist’s work, along with captions. Admittedly, this isn’t an ideal scenario. In a perfect world, jurors would be able to view the artworks in person.

It’s fair to say that each juror brings their own approach to the selection process, along with their own inherent biases. One thing is certain: Reviewing hundreds of applications requires a significant amount of work. To streamline the process, we’ve developed a jurying system that enables jurors to sort through submissions in various ways and organize them into different categories. On average, it takes about ten days to complete the selection for the main section of the publication. Once the juror’s review…

As the juror for this Midwest issue of New American Paintings—one of their five annual publications dedicated to painters making their lives and their art in a designated region of this country—I have been thinking a great deal about the significance of place. Prior to pouring over the submissions, I wondered whether I, a native Midwesterner and curator at a midwestern museum, would be able to detect any hint of a middle-of-the-map-specific genius loci. Rather, what I discovered and what this exhibition-in-print reveals is a rich engagement with a multifaceted potentia loci, or power of place, that offers possibilities both expected and surprising through a range of form and idioms.

Many of the artists selected for inclusion in this issue harness the power of place in overt and subtle ways, adeptly wielding its complexities to serve a multitude of ends. A number of them, including painter Rhonda Gates, whose sensitive and highly personal distillation of sensorial experiences with place earned her this year’s midwestern artist of noteworthy distinction, claim the designation of landscape artist—either in a traditional or less customary sense of the timeless genre. Strongly hewing to the latter, the Chicago artist Curtis Anthony Bozif creates enveloping, large-scale and mysterious, minimalist abstract paintings that pulse and shimmer. In his canvases, place is not something still or static; rather, it is imbued with flux. Stemming from close observation, his paintings evoke those elements of place that are fleeting and flicker such as atmosphere and light. Their glittering…