Hillstrom Museum of Arts Opens New Season with Grant Wood’s Lithographs Posted on September 9th, 2015 by

Grant Wood (1891-1942), Honorary Degree, 1938, lithograph on paper, 11 ¾ x 7 inches, Hillstrom Museum of Art purchase, with funds donated by the Reverend Richard L. Hillstrom, in honor of College President Axel Steuer

Grant Wood (1891-1942), Honorary Degree, 1938, lithograph on paper, 11 ¾ x 7 inches, Hillstrom Museum of Art purchase, with funds donated by the Reverend Richard L. Hillstrom, in honor of College President Axel Steuer

The Hillstrom Museum of Art at Gustavus Adolphus College is pleased to announce two concurrent exhibitions in the Museum opening on September 14 and running through November 8 — Grant Wood’s Lithographs: A Regionalist Vision Set in Stone and Art Inspiring Art: George Bellows’ Sunset, Shady Valley. An opening reception is scheduled for Monday, September 14 from 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m. and a special Nobel Conference 2015 reception 6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m. on Tuesday, October 6. In conjunction with the Wood’s exhibition, R. Tripp Evans will present a public lecture titled “Crossed Lines: Grant Wood’s Prints for Associated American Artists,” on Sunday, October 18, at 3:30 p.m., in Wallenberg Auditorium, Nobel Hall of Science. Admission to the Hillstrom Museum and the Evans’ lecture is open to the public at no charge. At the Nobel Conference reception, a special dance performance related to the Conference theme of addiction and choreographed by Michele Rusinko of the College’s Department of Theatre and Dance will be presented in the Museum. Titled This I Carry, it will be performed by alumna Amelia Ruth, a Minneapolis dance instructor who was a member of the Gustavus Dance Company during her student years.

Grant Wood’s Lithographs: A Regionalist Vision Set in Stone marks the first time the Hillstrom Museum of Art’s complete set of all nineteen of the lithographs by artist Grant Wood (1891–1942) will be exhibited together. These works include landscapes, images of Wood’s fellow Iowans, and emblematic depictions of the region’s flowers, fruits, vegetables, and crops. They were created in the last half decade of the artist’s life and were the locus of much of his artistic efforts in that period, when he painted only a handful of pictures and spent a great deal of time lecturing. As a group, they constitute nearly one fourth of Wood’s mature body of work. All but two of the Museum’s lithographs were donated, solely or jointly, by Dr. David and Kathryn Gilbertson and Museum namesake Richard L. Hillstrom.

One of Wood’s lithos, Honorary Degree (1938), is of particular significance to the Hillstrom Museum of Art as it was not only the first artwork purchased by the Museum but also included a Gustavus graduate as the model for one of its figures. The image was made after the artist received the first of several honorary degrees. He lampooned himself in the central figure contrasting his unsophisticated and exaggeratedly rotund form with the flanking tall and slender academic figures. The model for the man on the left was Carl Seashore, a 1891 Gustavus graduate and the Dean of the Graduate School at the University of Iowa during Wood’s tenure there as a professor.

July Fifteenth, lithograph on paper, 8 15/16 x 11 15/16 inches, gift of Dr. David and Kathryn Gilbertson

July Fifteenth, lithograph on paper, 8 15/16 x 11 15/16 inches, gift of Dr. David and Kathryn Gilbertson

In addition to Wood’s lithographs, the exhibition includes two self-portraits of the artist — a small bronze relief that reproduces a plaster depiction he made probably in 1925 and a caricature drawing dating to 1939 that doubles as an autograph of the artist. Both of the self-portraits were lent by private collectors. As in the self-depiction in Honorary Degree, Wood emphasized in the drawing and bronze portraits his distinctive cleft chin and the large, round frames of his eyeglasses.

Other works in the exhibit include a portrait drawing of an unidentified young woman, a signed copy of a 1937 limited edition of author Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street (for which Wood provided illustrations), a drawing of an ear of corn related to Wood’s never-completed autobiography Return from Bohemia lent by Childs Gallery, Boston, from the Collection of Thomas S. Holman, and two landscape paintings, one lent by Keichel Fine Art of Lincoln, Nebraska and the other from the collection of the Minnesota Museum of American Art in St. Paul.

As part of this exhibition, R. Tripp Evans, will give a public lecture titled “Crossed Lines: Grant Wood’s Prints for Associated American Artists.” R. Tripp Evans is Professor of Art History and Mary L. Heuser Chair in the Arts at Wheaton College, Norton, Massachusetts. He is author of the 2010 study Grant Wood: A Life, which re-examines what is known about Wood, including rumors circulating even in his lifetime that he was a closeted homosexual. Evans’ book presents a more nuanced understanding of Wood and his art. One of the works carefully analyzed in his study and included in the exhibit is the 1938 lithograph of a male nude titled Sultry Night.

A separate exhibition, Art Inspiring Art: George Bellows’ Sunset, Shady Valley, will also be on display in the Hillstrom Museum of Art between September 14 and November 8, 2015. Sunset, Shady Valley is a 1922 landscape by famed American artist George Bellows (1882-1925) described by Museum namesake Richard L. Hillstrom as the “crème de la crème” of his collection when it was included in a 1993 exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Art titled American Masters: Selections from the Richard Lewis Hillstrom Collection.

A depiction of the mountainous region around Woodstock, New York, where the artist spent a number of summers, Bellows’ oil is featured in Art Inspiring Art, an exhibition that couples it with two new artworks. One of these, a video by Priscilla Briggs of the Gustavus Adolphus College Department of Art and Art History, was inspired by the quality of the light in the painting. The second new work inspired by the painting is a poetic response written by Joyce Sutphen, a member of the College’s Department of English who is also the Poet Laureate of the State of Minnesota (a position to which she was appointed by Governor Mark Dayton in 2011).

Grant Wood’s Lithographs: A Regionalist Vision Set in Stone and Art Inspiring Art: George Bellows’ Sunset, Shady Valley will be on display in the Hillstrom Museum of Art beginning on September 14 and running through November 8. Admission to the Museum, the two receptions and the public lecture by R. Tripp Evans is free. The Hillstrom Museum of Art is open Monday – Friday, 9:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m. and weekends 1:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.

 

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