"The Couple with the Pitchfork: The Back Story to A Forthcoming Book," Wanda Corn and Joni Kinsey

Wanda Corn is a scholar of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American art and photography. Having earned a BA (1963), MA (1965) and Ph.D. (1974) from New York University, Professor Corn taught at Washington Square College, the University of California, Berkeley, and Mills College before moving to Stanford University in Palo Alto, California in 1980. At Stanford she held the university's first permanent appointment in the history of American art and served as chair of the Department of Art and Art History and Acting Director of the Stanford Museum. From 1992 to 1995 she was the Anthony P. Meier Family Professor and Director of the Stanford Humanities Center. In 2000, she became the Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor in Art History. She retired from teaching at Stanford in 2008. In 2009, she was the John Rewald Distinguished Visiting Lecturer, at the CUNY Graduate Center. Active as a curator of museum exhibitions, she has produced various books and exhibitions, including The Color of Mood: American Tonalism 1880-1910; The Art of Andrew Wyeth; and Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision. Her current work, The Couple with the Pitchfork, focuses on Grant Wood's most famous painting and the greater impact it has had on popular culture.

Joni L. Kinsey received her PhD from Washington University in St. Louis in 1989 and joined the University of Iowa faculty in 1991. Now retired, she taught a variety of classes, ranging from surveys of visual culture in the United States to thematic courses on American landscape painting, American print culture, art of the American National Parks, art and regional perspectives on America, and museum theory and practice, and Native American art at the University of Iowa. Her research specialties include nineteenth-century landscape painting and art of the American West and Midwest, but her interests and research ranges widely, from nineteenth-century popular prints to the rise of women artists in the central U.S.

Both Corn and Kinsey are members of the Grant Wood Catalogue Raisonné Advisory Panel

A Short Word: Polk County, Iowa, Juvenile Detention Students Respond to American Gothic in 2025, by editor Elaine Mattingly

Elaine Mattingly’s connection to all things Grant Wood goes back six generations in the Anamosa, Stone City, Viola and Cedar Rapids areas of Iowa. She presses into service her experience as a documentary film writer/producer, non-profit communications professional/editor and theatrical writer/producer/director as she facilitates the Grant Wood Country Forum with its partners and coordinates/edits the Grant Wood Country Chronicle. She holds degrees in literature and business from Cornell College, as well as experience serving as a research assistant at the University of Iowa.