IOWA CITY, IOWA.- The University of Iowa Museum of Art presents "Celebrating the Farm - The Art of Living on the Land," on view through May 4, 2003.  Farm Life in Iowa: Photographs by A.M. Wettach - A.M. "Pete" Wettach was a self-described commercial "agricultural photographer" from Mt. Pleasant, Iowa, who photographed farm families from the Depression through World War II and the post-war years. The thirty photographs in the exhibition commemorate rural farm life in Iowa while they are records of social and technological change.
The photographs were printed by the UIMA from vintage negatives drawn from the A.M. Wettach Collection, State Historical Society of Iowa, Iowa City branch. The exhibition will travel to ten locations across the state of Iowa through 2005.
Remembering the Family Farm, 150 Years of American Prints - Sixty-six prints by fifty artists including Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, Childe Hassam, Armin Landeck, Martin Lewis, and Benton Spruance depict the progress and decline of farms and farm life from the years 1853 to 1993. The prints provide a wealth of historic information and interpret the transformation of the farm landscape by new technologies such as corn planters and silos, as well as by dilapidated buildings, encroaching industry, and forbidding natural disasters.
The exhibition was organized by the Spencer Museum of Art, The University of Kansas, Lawrence, and curated by Stephen Goddard. The exhibition and accompanying catalogue are made possible with support from Steven Schmidt.
Rural Visions: Paintings by Marvin Cone - Marvin Cone’s paintings of the eastern Iowa landscape present a paradigmatic view of his surroundings. They are now emblematic of the changing countryside because many of Cone’s subjects are not extant today, the victim of time or urban development.
A Cedar Rapids native, Cone spent his life and career teaching art and French at Coe College. Throughout Cone’s long and active artistic career, his life-long friendship with Grant Wood dominated the public’s assessment of Cone’s own artistic importance. This exhibition, the first of Cone’s work in ten years, is drawn from private collections, Coe College in Cedar Rapids, and the University of Iowa. These rarely seen paintings offer an opportunity to view the rural visions of a native Iowan whose quiet eloquence has endured.