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,” they told Observer. “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.”

More for art collectors

• Annie Taylor On Collecting as Cultural Stewardship 

• Inside the Increasingly Litigious World of High-Value Art Sales

• Why a Signature Can Make or Break an Artwork’s Price

• The Benefits and Drawbacks of Fractionalized Art Ownership

• What Collectors Need to Know When Buying Art and Antiquities Abroad

• Why Most Art Galleries Don’t Offer Discounts

Lyndon Barrois Jr.: Rosette offers viewers multiple elements of the story. As you enter the museum’s Forum gallery, you see a conservator’s table, complete with brush, goggles, objets and a microscope hooked up to a computer monitor. A partially-painted canvas rests under the microscope, presumably mid-forgery. Standing here, you might be “Lumière,” the film script’s conservator-turned-possible-forger. To your right is a case of minerals and small sculptures, each in its own padded storage box and tilted 45-degrees towards the viewer. The case has the un-ornamented look of museum storage, but the arrangement of objects gives a film-ready quality. When you stand in front of the case, you might fall into the role of a visiting researcher or an unpaid intern seeking a quiet place to text. (No judgment. I’ve been that intern.) Turn around and you’ll see two paintings-as-prints advertising Barrois Jr.’s fictional film. Perhaps you’re a movie-goer, a memorabilia collector or an early-2000s film bootlegger with a digital video camera in their pocket.

Wherever you stand in Lyndon Barrois Jr.: Rosette, the artist asks you to consider the value of the objects you see and how that value is generated. More specifically, the show aims to take part in historical and cultural understandings of the extraction of resources, labor, visual culture and life from the Democratic Republic of Congo—and Africa more generally—by European nations and private firms. As Liz Park, the museum’s Richard Armstrong Curator of Contemporary Art, writes, the “rubber vine-like and elephantine shapes” of the Belgian Art Nouveau “recall the colonial roots of these forms.” Just as rubber and ivory were taken from Africa to become goods on a global market, so too were visual forms and styles taken. While this setup included European artists copying African art, it also included explorers, anthropologists and others raiding the material legacy of Africa to stock their mantelpieces, country estates, university offices and—eventually—public museums with objects derisively labeled ‘primitive.’ It is a system that turns living people into images of an unsalvageable past.

Pittsburgh residents might also place Lyndon Barrois Jr.: Rosette in another, hyper-local context—the 1992-2017 theft of $8 million worth of book plates, maps and photographic prints from the Carnegie Museum of Art’s neighbor, the Carnegie Public Library of Pittsburgh. For 25 years, Greg Priore, manager of the library’s rare books collection, extracted valuable elements from prized books and sold them. His partner in this criminal endeavor was John Schulman, former proprietor of Caliban Book Shop, located just a minute’s walk from the museum. Schulman passed the stolen goods along to unsuspecting buyers, including other library systems. When a 2017 audit of the library’s collection revealed the theft, it rocked public confidence in an otherwise reliable public institution. The very person intended to protect, care for and provide access to these invaluable objects was the one literally ripping them from their binding and selling them up the block and around the country.

With two conservators at the center of his script, Barrois Jr. brilliantly animates both of these historical contexts. The script’s main characters, Lumière and her new colleague, Seon-Min, work in a Belgian museum conserving art and African antiquities. As conservators, they’re entrusted with maintaining objects brought into Europe by colonial agents through theft or other ethically-questionable means of acquisition. Lumière, the script hints, might want to do more than just conserve. Barrois Jr. doesn’t specify exactly what Lumière will do and, in that way, prompts the viewer to speculate—to judge rather than simply watch.

Here, I’ll stick my neck out and guess that Lumière might want to send artifacts and artwork back to their global origins and leave the Belgian museum stocked with high-quality, impressively-crafted and good-as-old dupes. She might want to send some European works elsewhere, too. If that’s the case, Lumière’s plan is reminiscent of recent calls to decolonize museums. Definitions of “decolonization” in the museum field vary, but the term usually telegraphs a few things: narrating objects from indigenous perspectives, displaying indigenous objects with proper respect for relevant cultural norms, paying indigenous interlocutors to facilitate this work and repatriating objects to the cultures of their origins.

Repatriation is contentious, as it calls for museums to relinquish objects as well the cultural caché that comes with having, granting or denying access to and caring for those objects. Mary Wilcop, Senior Manager of Conservation at the Carnegie Museum of Art, says that, “conservation and conservation ethics have been leaned on for a long time to argue against repatriation.” Meanwhile, Sarah Jilani summarizes the anti-repatriation conservation argument this way: “those of us not from the ‘universal’ place and race cannot be trusted to preserve our own heritage, and must instead view it under close surveillance, in someone else’s house.” With decolonization in mind, Lumière’s potential actions model a question Barrois Jr. asked during a recent public conversation with Park and Wilcop: “What are the kinds of crimes that could happen for the right reason?”

When you hear a question like that, it’s easy to bark out a commandment: “Thou shalt not steal from museums.” The Priore-Schulman debacle that bookends the Carnegie Museum of Art seems evidence enough—$8 million worth of important, beautiful artwork was taken from a rustbelt institution and scattered in private and public hands elsewhere. I would make the case, however, that Priore-Schulman’s parallel isn’t the fictional conservator Lumière (who, I remind you, hasn’t even committed a crime yet; I’m the one fantasizing about the crimes). I think Priore-Schulman have more in common with the art museum in general.

The American Academy of Arts & Sciences reports that only 24% of Americans visited an art museum in 2016. Objects brought into museums through colonial extraction, especially objects sitting in research collections and un-exhibited, are accessible only to the museum-going minority and the even smaller group researching the objects behind locked doors. It’s a consolidation of culture that restricts access to objects and their value. This isn’t a general condemnation of museums but rather a specific inquiry: Is it better for an object to be locked in storage (or displayed with limited context) than to have it circulating among the people for whom it is already meaningful?

The characters in Barrois Jr.’s script aren’t planning to do what Priore-Schulman did. They aren’t planning to restrict access to only those who can afford to buy a rare work. Instead, if I’m daydreaming on their behalf correctly, they’re interested in duplicating works and disseminating them. As a result, more people will see an image or object and more people will encounter art. Authenticity, in this scenario, is less about the ‘hand of the artist’ and more about tracking—transparently and curiously—what each copy in each museum means, and how and why their values differ. The prompt Barrois Jr. posits through his characters requires delicate consideration, no doubt. Duplicating works might not make sense for every object, every medium or every practice. However, if we shut down even this hypothetical scenario, we’ve given up on addressing the creation and maintenance of value in museums. The strength of Lyndon Barrois Jr.: Rosette is in its unflinching insistence that the viewer come up with answers, even if they’re not the right ones.

In the back left corner of Lyndon Barrois Jr.: Rosette is a set of shipping crates painted with the Carnegie Museum’s signature red. These are actual crates used by the museum, carrying the tracking stickers of their trips—to Venice, to D.C., to Germany and back. Barrois Jr. borrowed these crates into his show from museum storage, as he did with magnification equipment, several mineral samples and small works of art. While the technological gizmos invoke the conservator’s lab, the crates bring to mind the workers who often go unseen in museums—registrars, administrative assistants, accountants, scientists, educators, art handlers and even janitors. Many of those workers at the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh (a system that includes the Carnegie Museum of Art) recently unionized, and the United Museum Workers union signed its first contract with the museum system in May of this year. Still, not every worker feels they benefit from the value art museums generate, which is the value Barrois Jr.’s show tracks.

One anonymous museum employee told me, “I do think the department I work for does much to ensure as accessible an environment as possible, and I admire the people I work with beyond measure. However, it goes without saying that $16 per hour is still not a living wage, and the museum purposefully keeps us part time so we cannot receive benefits. The museums could show solidarity with workers by valuing our livelihood in a real way.”

Lyndon Barrois Jr.: Rosette asks when it’s right to duplicate, important to steal or worthwhile to destabilize value. It’s a thought experiment that might lead us to other possibilities of living with art, but only if we’re willing to actually do something.

Lyndon Barrois Jr.: Rosette is on view at Carnegie Museum of Art through August 27.