Iowa Artists Of The First Hundred Years

Accompanying the recent Artists in Iowa: The First Century exhibition is a new major publication, written by Dr. Lea Rosson DeLong, which discusses the seventy works of art by over forty-five Iowa artists in the exhibition. The publication traces the earliest known art by the Meskwaki artist Wachochachi through the art of more recognized artists such as Lee Allen, Grant Wood, Christian Petersen, Christine Glasell and Eve Drewelowe who created New Deal murals, portraits, and captured scenes of urbanization in Iowa. The 258-page full color publication is available for purchase from the University Museums' office during business hours. Cost is $45.00 each; cash, check or credit card accepted."Iowa has a distinctive artistic heritage; we have only to look for it, preserve it, and pass it on to the next generations."-Dr. Lea Rosson DeLong, art historian and exhibition curator

A three-volume guide to the early art and artists of Ohio. It includes coverage of fine art, photography, ornamental penmanship, tombstone carving, china painting, illustrating, cartooning and the execution of panoramas and theatrical scenery.

For more than a century, Chicago's leading painters, sculptors, writers, actors, dancers and architects congregated together in close-knit artistic enclaves. After the Columbian Exposition, they set up shop in places like Lambert Tree Studios and the 57th Street Artist Colony. Nationally renowned figures like Theodore Dreiser, Margaret Anderson, Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan became colleagues, confidants and neighbors. In the 1920s, Carl Sandburg, Emma Goldman, Ernest Hemingway, Ben Hecht, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Clarence Darrow transformed the speakeasies and bohemian bistros of Towertown into Chicago's Greenwich Village. In Old Town, Renaissance man Edgar Miller and progressive architect Andrew Rebori collaborated on the Frank Fisher Studios, one of the finest examples of Art Moderne architecture in the country. From Nellie Walker to Roger Ebert, Keith Stolte visits Chicago's ascendant artistic spirits in their chosen sanctuaries.

To Midwesterners tucked into small towns or farms early in the twentieth century, the landscape of the American heartland reached the horizon—and then imagination had to provide what lay beyond. But when aviation took off and scenes of the Midwest were no longer earthbound, the Midwestern landscape was transformed and with it, Jason Weems suggests in this book, the very idea of the Midwest itself. Barnstorming the Prairies offers a panoramic vista of the transformative nature and power of the aerial vision that remade the Midwest in the wake of the airplane. This new perspective from above enabled Americans to conceptualize the region as something other than isolated and unchanging, and to see it instead as a dynamic space where people worked to harmonize the core traditions of America’s agrarian character with the more abstract forms of twentieth-century modernity. In the maps and aerial survey photography of the Midwest, as well as the painting, cinema, animation, and suburban landscapes that arose through flight, Weems also finds a different and provocative view of modernity in the making. In representations of the Midwest, from Grant Wood’s iconic images to the Prairie style of Frank Lloyd Wright to the design of greenbelt suburbs, Weems reveals aerial vision’s fundamental contribution to regional identity—to Midwesternness as we understand it. Reading comparatively across these images, Weems explores how the cognitive and perceptual practices of aerial vision helped to resymbolize the Midwestern landscape amid the technological change and social uncertainty of the early twentieth century.