Midwest Satellites is a multi-year relationship-building initiative and series of collaborations between Sixty and several regional cities.
Over the next two years, Sixty will work with partners in up to four cities to co-create projects that echo and find inspiration in Sixty’s existing editorial and archiving programs but are customized for the needs and circumstances of each city’s cultural ecosystem. Together, we will decide on what projects to develop in their locations and define the team and resources needed to make them happen.
Midwest Satellites is an evolution of Sixty Regional, a Sixty initiative that started as an editorial effort in 2016. With many of Sixty’s team living in Chicago but calling other parts of the Midwest home, we’ve always had a desire to tell a wider story of artists, art, archiving, and cultural caretaking in our region. In the wake of a rough political year, we launched Sixty Regional as an editorial initiative that provoked conversations and connections across local geographies between the artists, writers, and archivists who are shaping the culture of the Midwest.
The first year of Sixty Regional included a series of published articles by local artists and writers within each location. The following year we expanded these partnerships to include collaborative residencies, cross-state discussions, a symposium, a new artist-run online publication, writer exchanges, and mini-grants to our partners. In 2018, we officially incorporated our Midwest scope into Sixty’s mission and today we have contributors, editors, and collaborators from wider reaches of the Midwest, including Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, and Wisconsin.
We’re now continuing these efforts and evolving this program through Midwest Satellites. Over the next two years Sixty will spark a series of editorial, archival, and curatorial collaborations between Sixty and several regional cities. We will work with partners and current residents of each city to co-create projects that echo and find inspiration in Sixty’s existing editorial and archiving programs but are customized for the needs and circumstances of each city’s cultural ecosystem.
Together, we will decide on what projects to develop in their locations and define the team and resources needed to make them happen. As projects develop in these satellite cities, we will also be giving regional team members, artists, and partners an introduction and invitation to the other offerings of Sixty, specifically the benefits of Sixty Collective and the creative exchanges, residencies, and gig opportunities available through this program.
Our goal is to build the kind of lasting relationships that will continue long after the projects end through the experience of creating archival and editorial projects together, and sharing creative and career resources with each partner becoming a long term collaborator in Sixty’s mission to thoughtfully nurture more inclusive cultural records of queer, Indigenous, diasporic, and disability communities in the Midwest.
This project is made possible with funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and inspiration from our network of regional partners and collaborators.
