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A can't-miss event with preeminent Grant Wood scholar and award-winning art historian Wanda M. Corn. Corn's lecture will be given in honor of Lynette L. Pohlman, retired director (2026) of University Museums. Held in the Memorial Union, Sun RoomGrant Wood’s American Gothic is an instantly recognizable painting that is seen as either “awkward farm portrait” or “meme-worthy icon.” Inspired by a small home in Eldon, Iowa (still standing), Wood, a leading figure of the Regionalist art movement, celebrated the common people of the American heartland in this and many other well-known scenes.
Award-winning historian of American art and culture Wanda Corn is stopping by Iowa State to unpack the heavily parodied painting’s rise to fame and its ongoing reinventions in popular culture.
This lively lecture, presented in honor of Lynette L. Pohlman, retired Warren & Beverly Madden Director and Chief Curator of University Museums, is Corn’s only Central Iowa stop on her national book tour. This program is organized by University Museums at Iowa State University in partnership with Princeton University Press. Generous support for this program was given by Warren and Beverly Madden, the Committee on Lectures (funded by Student Government), and University Museums Membership.
Did you know? Iowa State’s Parks Library is home to the largest murals ever designed by Grant Wood. Created through the federal Public Works of Art Project (1933-1934), these works of art are themselves icons of Iowa State University and remain a cornerstone of the University Museums’ Art on Campus Collection. (https://museums.iastate.edu/art-campus)
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Wanda M. Corn, PhD, is an American art and cultural historian and the Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor Emerita in Art History at Stanford University. She is the author of The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915–1935, Women Building History: Public Art at the 1893 Columbian Exposition, Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern, and The Couple with the Pitchfork: American Gothic from Easel to Icon. Corn is a recipient of fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and has served on the boards of the Wyeth Foundation for American Art and the Terra Foundation for American Art.
📍Held in the Memorial Union, Sun Room
Grant Wood, American Gothic, 1930. Art Institute of Chicago © 2026 Figge Art Museum, successors to the Estate of Nan Wood Graham/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.
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Event venue
Iowa State University Memorial Union, 2229 Lincoln Way, Ames, IA 50014-7163, United States
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