Jim Hayes was beaming after delivering a recent talk on Grant Wood’s historic house in Iowa City before a crowd of senior citizens living at Vintage Cooperative in Coralville.

That’s because one of the residents there, Judy Terry, had just presented him with a special gift – a gnarled...

This year, the University of Iowa Grant Wood Symposium — now in its sixth biennial iteration — tackles the topic of public art. The symposium, a program of the UI Office of Outreach and Engagement, presented by the Grant Wood Art Colony, seeks to engage with Wood’s legacy, this year by exploring...

Mildred Lenore Weenink, who would become a well-known Iowa artist and arts advocate, was 2 years old in 1891 when her parents moved from Wisconsin to Dillon, Mont., where her father, H.D. Weenink, opened a photography studio.

One of four children, she graduated from Beverhead County High...

IN 1939, the artist Grant Wood, whose folksy portrayals of Midwestern scenes had made him a household name in the Depression-era United States, created a picture of a naked farmhand. In the lithograph, which he titled Sultry Night, the farmhand pours a pail of bathwater over his head in the...