In this special Prairie Lights event, sponsored by the Grant Wood Society and taking place at The James Theatre in Iowa City, award-winning art historian Wanda M. Corn will read from her new book, The Couple with the Pitchfork: American Gothic from Easel to Icon.
Described as "A rich, evolving history of one of the most recognized couples in the world," The Couple with the Pitchfork is "a highly readable and personalized study of a painter and the work he would forever be tied to" (https://press.princeton.edu).
Wanda Corn’s scholarship, as well as her teaching, has focused on art and artists of the American Gilded Age, early 20th-century avant-garde modernist culture along the Atlantic rim, and American artists commonly identified as regionalists. She named and defined the American Tonalist movement and has renewed interest in forgotten artists such as Grant Wood and the women artists who produced murals for the 1893 World’s Fair.
Corn’s travelling exhibition on Georgia O’Keeffe, supported by a Mellon Emeritus grant, pioneered in showcasing not only works of art but examples of clothing drawn from the artist’s distinctive wardrobe and photographs demonstrating her singular style of modeling for the camera.
Her research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Stanford Humanities Center, the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study, The Center for Advanced Study at the National Gallery in Washington, DC, the Clark Art Institute, and the Georgia O’Keeffe Research Center (https://art.stanford.edu/people/wanda-m-corn).
This event is free and open to the public.