Grant wood biography and art festival
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Grant Wood
(1891-1942)
Who Was Grant Wood?
Grant Wood was an American painter who is best known for his work depicting the Midwest. In 1930, he exhibited his most famous painting, American Gothic. Among the most iconic and recognizable images in American art, it helped propel Wood to fame and launch the Regionalist movement, of which Wood became the de facto spokesperson.
Early Life
Grant Wood was born on his parents’ farm outside of Anamosa, Iowa, on February 13, 1891. These idyllic settings would leave a lasting impression on Wood and profoundly influence his later thinking and work, though he would spend much of his life after the age of 10 in the relatively more urban setting of Cedar Rapids, where his mother moved Wood and his younger sister Nan after their father died.
Wood developed his interest in art while still in grammar school and showed promise. He continued to nurture his talents in high school where he designed sets for plays and illustrated student publica
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Grant Wood
1891-1942
Grant Wood was born on a farm near Anamosa, Iowa. After his father's death in 1901, the Wood family moved to Cedar Rapids. Wood spent most of his life in Cedar Rapids, and it was here he first developed his artistic aspirations. As a ungdom growing up in this small but burgeoning Midwestern city, his teachers and the community applauded Wood’s talent for drawing and making clever objects.
Wood attended Washington High School and, together with his good friend and fellow artist, Marvin Cone (1891-1965), painted scenery for school plays and illustrated school publications. The two young artists also assisted with the installation of exhibitions at the Cedar Rapids Art Association, originated in 1895 and located in the Carnegie Library.
While in high school, Wood taught han själv to make jewelry, copperware, ornamental light fixtures, and furniture. Following his 1910 high school graduation, Wood completed two summers of stud
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Summary of Grant Wood
Hailed as one of America's foremost Regionalist painters in the 1930s, Grant Wood strove to depict archetypal rural subjects that embodied the values of hard work, community, and austerity. Eschewing the idioms of avant-garde European art, Wood depicted his native Midwest with the clarity and precision he observed in Northern Renaissance art and the organic lines and curves of Art Deco design, melding these disparate styles into a uniquely American vision. In painting small town and rural life, Wood gave the American public an idealized vision of itself at a time during the Great Depression when most common, working Americans faced great hardship.
In subsequent decades, his work has been praised and derided by critics and public alike, but his paintings, and in particular American Gothic, remain some of the most iconic, and appropriated, paintings created bygd an American artist, thus providing Wood with a permanent place in American popular culture.