Cedar Rapids Museum of Art summer shows look at life in the 1930s

CEDAR RAPIDS — A pair of old jeans glued to a door opened the door for a pair of summer shows at the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art.

Of course, they aren’t just any old jeans glued to just any old door. Grant Wood is the crafty visionary who glued them to a cupboard door at 5 Turner Alley, the loft apartment where he painted “American Gothic.”

“That he actually glued denim overalls onto the doors is part of why they have aged a little roughly. That’s not a process that you expect to last for 100 years,” said Kate Kunau, the museum’s curator.

“We’ve had them in our collection for quite some time. They’re a little bit delicate, so we don’t have them on view very often,” she said. “But they are what really inspired the exhibition to begin with, just thinking about what a fun piece they are, and that they’re not often on view.

“And from that, we extrapolated like, there’s actually a bunch of his works that showcase denim in different varieties, so we can start from this really interesting point and showcase how he utilized the fabric in his work.”

The result is “Overalls: Grant Wood’s Depictions of Denim,” on view in the second-floor back gallery until Aug. 27. The exhibit features about 25 photographs, lithographs, paintings and drawings showing Wood wearing overalls, as well as others clad in denim.

“It’s actually a wide variety of media,” Kunau said, adding that even though Wood “liked dressing pretty snappily … he definitely realized that overalls were part of his brand.”

Then noting that a person’s “brand” is a term from today, not the 1930s, Kunau said Wood “was very cognizant of the statement that they made about good ol’ Iowa farm boy, which he certainly was well-aware was his brand nationally.”

Work and Society in the 1930s

While Wood’s pieces paint a bucolic view of rural life in his day, a much larger first-floor exhibition offers a different perspective of life during the Great Depression.

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“Work and Society in the 1930s: American Paintings and Photographs from the Shogren-Meyer Collection,” features 59 pieces on loan from Minneapolis-area private art collectors David Shogren and Susan Meyer, who spent their careers working in industry.

The two summer shows “are completely separate, especially from each other, but they’re quite related,” Sean Ulmer, the museum’s executive director, told the art enthusiasts gathered for the pairing’s opening reception on June 1.

As with the Wood exhibit, viewers of Shogren-Meyer exhibit “will see a number of images of workers, laborers wearing denim, overalls, what have you, because it was a ubiquitous uniform in the 1930s,” Ulmer said.

“Part of our excitement about borrowing the collection that makes up the exhibition … is how it does provide such a wonderful context for the work of Grant Wood, especially the work that he created during his most productive career in the 1930s.”

Ulmer encouraged visitors to go through both exhibits and “soak all of this in — both the work that Grant Wood was doing himself, but also the work of his contemporaries, and how different his work is from theirs. The kind of ways in which the different artists approached life at a particularly difficult time in the United States, actually, globally, in the depths of a Great Depression.

“There were many, many challenges that Americans and the entire world were facing. Challenges that we, in some ways, still face to this very day,” Ulmer noted. “Food insecurity, climate change, underemployment, the struggles that people have on a day-to-day basis, which were really, really heightened and focused in the 1930s, are still very much in focus today.

“It’s really an extraordinary pair of exhibitions and really rewards a lot of careful looking,” he said.

Shogren and Meyer have loaned pieces from their collection to various museums, and have been eager to create an exhibition for the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, where Shogren often spent his free time during business trips.

About four years in the works, Kunau was thrilled when the couple reached out with their “amazing collection.”

“I saw right away how beautifully it would dovetail with our Grant Woods, our Marvin Cones, and the strong American collection that we have in the early- to mid-20th century,” she said.

“The show reflects a different side of that time period. It does a wonderful job of rounding out our collection and showing a less optimistic and perhaps more realistic view of where America was during the 1930s and the decades that surrounded that.”

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The couple, who studied history and political science in college, have been collecting art for about 35 or 40 years.

“It is a passion for us,” Shogren said, noting they largely focus on works from the early 20th century.

“We believe that this particular time — the American scene in the 1930s — really doesn’t get as much attention as it should get,” Shogren said. “Some of it may be the time.

“But what we basically collect is the 1920s, because we believe to really and truly tell the story of the Depression and the Dust Bowl, we need to go back into the ’20s to learn what the causes were. And on the same end, and you need to go into the 1940s to really and truly understand how the Depression and frankly, into World War II, significantly changed the atmosphere.

“But our sweet spot is the 1930s.”

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He explained the American Scene as falling between the two world wars, when Americans were wary and weary of Europe, and immigrants didn’t want to be reminded of the war they left behind.

“So there was this kind of introspective viewpoint of ‘Let’s look at the American scene.’ And that’s pretty much what a lot of the art of this period was,” Shogren said. “There was no other period in American history where more art was created than in the 1930s, and a lot of that was due to the WPA (Work Progress Administration), and all of the programs that they had, to employ artists. And it wasn’t just artists that were painting. It was artists doing music, plays, writing, there was stage work, photography.

“It was amazing how many works of art were created during this time period, and the beauty of that is many of those works still are around today,” he said, citing the paintings that still grace the walls of post offices and government buildings.

“There’s a message of what Americans went through in the 1930s to get through the Depression,” he said. “ … We do think that the time period of the 1930s has a lot of things that people can learn from. And as they say, history repeats itself. The question that I and Susan would ask ourselves is, ‘Are people listening to pay attention?’ Because if not, then we are probably going to repeat this.”

Moving on

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Kunau is winding up eight and a half years at the museum on June 30. She and her family are moving to St. Louis this summer, where her husband will embark on a surgical fellowship.

“I'm looking forward to taking a year off and hanging out with my daughter,” the new mom said.

As the museum’s curator, Kunau said she is “very pleased” the two summer shows are the final exhibitions she’s creating there.

While the museum has shown works from private collectors in the Corridor, this is the first non-local showing she’s worked on in Cedar Rapids.

Kunau said it’s always fun to see works by well-known artists in private collections — like the pieces by John Steuart Curry, Margaret Bourke-White, Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein and Gordon Parks in this one. But it was “really fun to see the lesser known artists, where the name didn’t ring any bells with me, but the art is really spectacular,” she said. “So it was fun to see so many wonderful examples of those” in the Shogren-Meyer exhibition.

Kunau has left her own stamp on the museum. Ulmer noted that since she arrived in 2015, Kunau has “overseen 65 exhibitions and 425 acquisitions to the collection. So Kate won’t be here, but her legacy will.”

New curator announced

Julia Jessen will begin July 10 as the museum’s new curator of collections and exhibitions. A 2014 graduate of the University of Iowa, she received Master of Arts degrees in art history and museum studies in 2020 from Syracuse University in New York.

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She began her career at the University of Iowa Museum of Art (now the Stanley Museum of Art) where she served as education coordinator for three years before leaving for graduate school. She returned to Iowa as registrar of the Museum of Danish America in Elk Horn.

Ulmer said he’s “thrilled” to bring Jessen to the Cedar Rapids museum.

“Her experience, energy,and enthusiasm are great assets in a curator,” he said. “I look forward to the exhibitions she will create, the acquisitions she will make, and the new ideas she will bring to the table.”

Comments: (319) 368-8508; diana.nollen@thegazette.com