Abstract

In 1923, Grant Wood completed Savage Iowa, a suite of three finished drawings depicting imagined vignettes of life before the state was fully settled: a buffalo stampede on Main Street, Indian warriors snatching clothing from a pioneer woman’s clothesline, and a cowboy chasing a “squaw” who grasps a rag doll. Wood’s secretary and companion Park Rinard, who inherited the drawings, described them as a commentary on how Easterners viewed the Midwest as a “wild territory with cowboys and Indians.” And in fact, “Savage Iowa” does illuminate an important, neglected theme in Wood’s work: the representation of Native Americans. 

In his autobiography, Wood describes family encounters with Native Americans and their impact on his imagination. “The fields were never empty for me after that,” he writes, picturing a land traversed by the “brown feet of restless tribes.” Even corn shocks were transformed into ghostly Indian villages. Throughout his career, Wood envisioned a mythic people whose lives provided a kind of prehistory for the civilized state. His initial design for the stained glass window of the 1928 Cedar Rapids Veteran’s Memorial was an Indian princess and in 1940, he announced that the next work in his “American Folklore” series would be “Pocahontas and John Smith.”

For Wood, Indian removal was the essential precondition for the advent of civilization. Even the title of his mural, “When Tillage Begins,” from a Daniel Webster quotation praising farmers as “founders of civilization,” only makes sense after reading Webster’s preceding sentence, arguing that human beings can only transcend their “savage” state through settlement. Until then, they are “roaming barbarians.” But the traces of this absence were everywhere for the artist, in his own childhood memories, in folktales, even in the triangular forms of corn shocks.

About the presenter

David Ehrenpreis is Professor of Art History at James Madison University and has published widely in journals including the Zeitschrift for Kunstgeschichte, Woman’s Art Journal, and Art Book. He is author of the book Picturing Harrisonburg: Visions of a Shenandoah Valley City since 1828, which examines shifting visions of place and community in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. The curator of numerous exhibitions including a survey of Chinese artist Xu Bing, he has received grants from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the College Art Association, and the State Historical Society of Iowa. He has served as a Visiting Fellow at Leibniz Center for Contemporary History, Potsdam (ZZF) and taught in FUBiS, the international summer program of Berlin’s Freie Universität. His current book project is entitled “Dying for the Nation: Monuments and the Experience of National Memory."