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.