When trying to submit his work to open-call art shows, University of Wisconsin-Madison junior Bryce Dailey often faces financial barriers. Shows typically require artists to pay a whole host of fees — from entry fees to shipping fees — making these opportunities inaccessible to young up-and-coming artists like himself.
“A lot of shows will require you to pay a fee of $40, $30 just to submit to it,” Dailey told The Daily Cardinal Sunday. “People don't talk about how hard it is for artists to be profitable.”
Determined to give artists more opportunities, Dailey decided to organize his own independent exhibit: the Midwest Print Showcase. As an open-call showcase, any established or emerging Midwest printmaking artists were welcome to apply so long as they resided in the Midwest or within 500 miles of Madison.
The showcase opens at the Commonwealth Gallery on Feb. 26 and will feature printmaking artists from across the Midwest. Dailey heard about the Commonwealth gallery from other artists he knew and said the gallery’s flexibility and willingness to rent directly to artists makes it the perfect place to host.
“[It] kind of ties into the DIY aspect of it,” Dailey said. “I can set up the exhibit however I want without any real rules.”
To apply to the showcase, artists only needed to pay a $10 entry fee which went strictly toward gallery rental costs, and any profits made will go directly to the artists. Having experienced firsthand how large galleries take significant commissions or cuts from sales — making them unprofitable for artists — Dailey said he’s just looking to bring people together, not turn a profit.
In total, the show includes 17 Midwest printmaking artists specializing in screen print, etching, woodcut and cyanotype. Most of the artwork displayed in the showcase will be up for sale at artists' discretion with a print sale on opening night that Dailey hopes will help the artists generate profit.
At 15, Dailey started experimenting with printmaking in his garage at home. Now, he mainly works with different photographs using a printing technique called “cyanotype” which creates blue-colored prints.
“Everything is such a different process with printmaking. If you talk about printmaking to a random person, they probably might not even know what it is,” Dailey said.
Through the showcase, Dailey hopes he can change that, bringing attention to a medium that isn’t often talked about and giving printmaking artists like himself an opportunity to display their work.
As a smaller showcase, Dailey believed it would be easier to attract local interest from the Madison area or around Wisconsin, but he ended up titling the exhibit “Midwest Print Showcase” with the hope of reaching artists around the wider region.
“I never thought I was actually gonna get people from other states, but I did, and it was really surprising to me,” Dailey said.
Of the 17 artists, around 10 are UW-Madison students or affiliated with the university. Many others are from out-of-state, coming from states like Iowa and Nebraska, with some even driving six hours to drop off an artwork.
Dailey began planning the showcase back in October 2024.
“The biggest challenge was probably finding ways to promote it, to get the word out to artists,” he said.
To spread the word, Dailey put up flyers, sent emails to all fine arts majors and masters students he could find through the UW directory and posted it all over the internet. He even reached out to his Intro to Serigraphy classmates. That’s where Nora Murphy, a junior fine arts major at UW-Madison, heard about the opportunity to showcase her art.
Murphy has two pieces in the showcase from a series of prints titled “Skelly’s Dream.” She created both pieces through her printmaking class in response to the prompt, “interference.” She said she was inspired by “life” and “death” and how those concepts interfere with each other.
“I drew the dandelions and the vines, because it's kind of like life, and even the moth is sort of representing life. And then there's the skeleton, which is death,” Murphy said.
To create the prints, Murphy scanned pictures of a skeleton and moth and used Photoshop to pixelate the images, eventually using a light table to burn the images into the screen in a process known as bitmap printing.
In total, Murphy created about 13 prints and experimented with each one, adding glitter, vines and even a cocktail umbrella. The red and blue prints she submitted to the showcase were some of her favorites.
“I just wanted to submit two different versions of it because some of them look way more similar,” she said.
Murphy’s classmate, Jordan Hogg, an art education major at UW-Madison, also has three pieces in the showcase, including a relief print titled “Two Headed Fawn” and two screenprints, “Eye of the Tiger” and “Girlhood.” Her inspiration for “Girlhood” came from an old 1960’s magazine with advertisements about women and their lifestyles. The ads discussed topics like cleaning, clothing styles and maintaining an ideal body type.
“I really wanted to embrace that in that piece and add different elements that represented girlhood to me,” she said.
The Midwest Print show is a unique experience for all involved.
“Any other show that I've had has really been through [the] university, so to have one through a peer at a gallery is really cool,” Hogg said.
For Murphy, the showcase reminded her how cool Madison’s student art community is, and she is glad to have the opportunity to showcase her work.
“I think it's just exciting for the students. It gets them excited to show their work and to keep making stuff,” she said.
As the student organizer, Dailey hopes the showcase will inspire visitors to gain a greater appreciation of printmaking and art in general.
“It just seems to me like the general public isn't really as interested in art, and I want to inspire people to find a passion for it like I have,” he said.
The Midwest Print Showcase runs from Feb. 26 to March 4 with opening night on Feb. 28. Admission is free.
