DES MOINES, IA.- After Many Springs: Regionalism, Modernism & the Midwest is the first exhibition to address the artistic battles that were waged simultaneously in New York and the Midwest during the 1930s and the early 1940s. In the midst of the Great Depression, one of the most contentious and fractious artistic debates emerged, one that pitted progressive modernist figures such as Jackson Pollock, Charles Sheeler, and Philip Guston, against artists who sought a revival of tradition. Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry, and Grant Wood fought against abstraction, believing that American subjects should be conveyed only by straightforward, recognizable imagery. While Benton would become one of the most vocal spokespersons for the movement that became known as Regionalism, his painting, like that of Wood, actually had its origins in abstraction and the Modernist movement.

Drawing on the work of artists such as Benton, Curry, and Wood, as well as Margaret Bourke-White, Guston, Dorothea Lange, Pollock, Ben Shahn, Sheeler, and others, After Many Springs aims to rethink and probe such terms as Regionalism and Modernism. While these movements are usually seen as opposites, this exhibition aims to challenge that perception by highlighting the various formal and thematic correspondences that subtly weave them together.

Comprised of painting, photography, and documentary film, the works in this exhibition portray not only the Midwestern landscape, but convey complex issues prevalent in the Depression era, including poverty, racism, and ecological devastation.