A Chilling Make Believe: Alexis Rockman on Grant Wood

This talk by artist Alexis Rockman examines the romanticized and ambivalent view of a pre-industrial rural world in Grant Wood’s landscape paintings. In his talk, Rockman will situate Wood in a tradition of American art in which national identity depends on a personal visual vocabulary. The artist will also discuss his own longstanding engagement with Wood through landscape paintings that mix contemporary dread and hope for our ecological future.