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 will be open to visitors during regular hours while the College is on fall break, October 24-27. It’s two concurrent exhibitions, Grant Wood’s Lithographs: A Regionalist Vision Set in Stone and Art Inspiring Art: George Bellows’ Sunset, Shady Valley, opened in September and will be on display through November 8.
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.
A separate exhibition, Art Inspiring Art: George Bellows’ Sunset, Shady Valley, will also be on display. It 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 through November 8. Admission to the Museum 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.