Grant Wood’s Artwork, Dream-Work, and Literary Work
Sun, June 10, 2018
3 pm
Grant Wood, Stone City, 1930. Oil on wood, 30 1/4 x 40 in. (76.8 x 101.6 cm). Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska; gift of the Art Institute of Omaha 1930.35. © Figge Art Museum, successors to the Estate of Nan Wood Graham/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
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Floor 3, Theater
Grant Wood’s visual work inhabits an unusual space in 20th century American art, both within and outside of the canon, simultaneously uniquely recognizable and deeply inscrutable. In this lecture, a collaboration with the London Review of Books, Kevin Kopelson, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Iowa and one of the LRB’s most distinctive contributors, argues that this inscrutability can be attributed to a curious phenomenon: while Wood produced work much the way dreamers dream, he also did so the way writers write. These are two modes of production that overlap in several respects, but which do not otherwise have a lot in common, and they place Wood in an alternative, literary tradition, stretching from Mark Twain to David Sedaris – the subject of Kopelson’s 2007 monograph. By looking again at Wood’s paintings through a lens of his own statements, particularly concerning the imagination, Kopelson traces their peculiar charge back to its source: a tension between unconscious desires and anxieties and their broad public expression.
Following Kopelson's talk, writer, scholar, and artist Terry Castle offers a response. Castle teaches at Stanford University and is also a long-time contributor to the LRB.
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