Cultivating Citizens

During the 1930s and 1940s, painters Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and John Steuart Curry formed a loose alliance as American Regionalists. Some lauded their depictions of the rural landscape and hardworking inhabitants of America’s midwestern heartland; others deemed their painting dangerous, regarding its easily understood realism as a vehicle for jingoism and even fascism. Cultivating Citizens focuses on Regionalists and their critics as they worked with and against universities, museums, and the burgeoning field of sociology. Lauren Kroiz shifts the terms of an ongoing debate over subject matter and style, producing the first study of Regionalist art education programs and concepts of artistic labor.

In anii 1930 si 1940, pictorii Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton si John Steuart Curry au format o alianta libera ca regionalisti americani. Unii si-au laudat descrierile despre peisajul rural si locuitorii harnici ai inimii din vestul Americii; altii au considerat pictura lor periculoasa, considerand realismul sau usor de inteles ca un vehicul pentru jingoism si chiar fascism.