“It’s Gotta be in Ya:” Heroic Individualism and the Roadside Concrete Sculpture Garden of the American Midwest, 1910-1960” examines the ways in which Midwestern concrete art environment artists interpreted and expressed the era’s variant of heroic individualism – a term related to the American mythology models of grit, self-reliance, exceptionality, and pioneerism – as it relates to creativity, labor, and home improvement, carving out space for their own ambitions, attitudes, and ideals. It begins by surveying how the artists, historians, columnists, and the public have positioned the artists and artwork according to heroic arcs, revealing specific cultural values expressed through the aesthetics of the artwork. Then, it examines how artists expressed, reimagined, and personalized the values of heroic individualism - such as hard work, individuality, and civic responsibility - through their choices of material, scale, space, and subject matter. The works juggled ideals of grandiosity and simplicity in the same way that the artists juggled the ideal of themselves as visionaries as well as ordinary people. Their personal location, monumental forms and materials, and heroic subjects illustrate what the artists and viewers articulated as achievements of cultural and personal heroics.