The story
In 1929 Grant Wood painted his mother, Hattie, standing before a spare Iowa landscape with a potted snake plant in her hands. Woman with Plants hangs here in Cedar Rapids, the city where Wood grew up and taught school, and it is the picture that anchors this museum. By the museum's own account it holds the largest collections anywhere of Wood, of his close friend the landscape painter Marvin Cone, and of Bertha Jaques, a Chicago etcher. Wood's later canvas Young Corn is here too.
The museum grew out of an art club that local enthusiasts formed in 1895. Ten years later they were offered a gallery inside the city's new Carnegie Library. When the library moved out in 1985, the art association took over the whole building, and the postmodern architect Charles Moore designed a new wing beside it, opened in 1989.
Beyond the rooms of Wood and Cone, visitors find prints by Mauricio Lasansky, the Argentine-born printmaker who taught at the University of Iowa, and a group of ancient Roman portrait busts. The museum also looks after Wood's former studio a few blocks away, a converted hayloft above a carriage house where he lived and worked from 1924 to 1935 and where he painted American Gothic in 1930.
