American Regionalism:
Images of the Heartland

In the 1930s and 1940s, many American artists rejected the influence of European abstraction in their struggle to develop a distinctly American art. They created narratives using familiar, local imagery and a naturalistic style. Inspired by their Midwestern roots, painter-printmakers Thomas Hart Benton from Missouri, John Steuart Curry from Kansas, and Grant Wood from Iowa frequently presented an idealistic agrarian life in their work. Small towns and farmlands with their laborers and residents became the archetype for rural America, the heartland. In the wake of the Great Depression, these images conveyed the virtue of hard work and celebrated the nation’s resilient spirit.

This exhibition includes the triumvirate—Benton, Curry, and Wood—and features works by their contemporaries, such as Margaret Burroughs, Adolf Dehn, and Doris Lee as well as more recent depictions of rural life in America.