Looking at the lineup of the artists I can hardly believe that you are actually making a show about US Heartland! Majority of the artists are from major metro areas (Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis and such.) Some are at this point New Yorkers

Notable exception is Alec Soth who is an A-list artist urbanite but actively traveled outside of the metro-art bubble. He is a good representative of the “earnestness” of the heartland art/culture. This, by the way, is a feature that makes a great deal of mid-western art production rather unpalatable to most of NYC/LA art crowd. He actually uses words like “beautiful” and “sweet” in his artist talk and his photographs are amazingly “protestant” (a bit sloppy but I can’t come up with a better wording right now.)

I apologize if I am off base, since I haven’t seen the actual show, but after reading a couple of press releases and going to your website it seems that you are simply reinforcing the hegemony of the metro art sensibility! In some ways there is nothing wrong with that: I would rather go to Chicago or Minneapolis to check out art then to central Illinois or most places in Michigan. However the whole red/blue dialog does not happen in the urban areas of midwest or mid-south! And this is not a way to get at the psyche of the Heartland! Artists flock to urban centers to escape their churchy republican neighbors and get closer to opportunities to be in shows such as the one you have put together.

American visual culture is extremely rich because it is so heterogeneous but you are filtering it through a New York gallery lens! I very much respect the work of all of the curators involved in this project, but I would call upon you to question artworld structures and prejudices as well as public perceptions of the Heartland.