Mount Vernon barn exhibit highlights new contrasts of Iowa’s heritage

MOUNT VERNON — An art exhibit at Abbe Creek Gallery is bringing new dimensions to some of rural America’s most treasured emblems.

In Bill Stamats latest collection, you won’t find the same dull textures, faded colors and framing that has become a stereotype for places often called “flyover country.”

Instead, you will find vivid contrasts, unconventional sky colors and a connection to ancestral heritage that goes beyond the surface of old barns, grain elevators and bridges overlooked by even those who live closest to them.

The 16-piece collection of acrylic paintings and assemblages by Stamats, a long-time Cedar Rapids resident and former executive vice president of family company Stamats Communications, serves as a love letter to Iowa — the retiree’s final farewell as he moves to Washington state.

“My work is a study of these structures, and by extension, the objects and relics of rural America,” Stamats said. “Part chronicle and part celebration, my paintings and assemblages are a tribute to the practical beauty, to peeling paint and popped nails, to what is found again after being nearly forgotten.”

Back Roads and Blue Skies

Acrylic paintings, inspired by areas from Stamats’ upbringing as well as his travels, blend scenes of structures from Iowa and other states.

Though Stamats’ engagement with art started early in life, his affair with barns started in earnest several years ago with photos documenting places like his family’s Century barn on Wilder Drive in Cedar Rapids.

“I said someday I’ll make a painting, and I did,” he said.

The barn was subsequently destroyed by the derecho in 2020.

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Other pieces include scenes from the Sac and Fox Trail, barns and a bridge on Rosedale Road SE in Cedar Rapids, and pieces from Massachusetts, Montana and upstate New York. Most out-of-state pieces were discovered by happenstance in his travels.

“I’m always looking for an interesting barn,” he said. “(Iowa is) viewed as more bucolic and about agriculture and big ag, but that’s not to say there isn’t agriculture in other states.”

Through a neo-regionalist mentality, he layers onto the quintessentially Midwestern foundation set by artists like Grant Wood and Marvin Cone.

Using color block techniques inspired by abstract expressionist Mark Rothko, he makes eye-catching color choices that separate a barn from its surroundings.

“If you remove the barns, they’re essentially color field paintings. It makes the viewer look at the barn first, and then the color around the barn,” Stamats said. “If I removed the detail of the barn, they’d be color field paintings.”

Using transparent layers of fluorescent paint adds yet another dimension that makes it pop, delivering the luminosity of an oil painting in acrylic works. Contemporary art, he said, compels these choices — elements that art observers respond to.

Another thing they’re engaged by is detail, he said — found meticulously across the collection, even from the relatively distant perspective of some of his subjects. He spends about 80 to 100 hours, on average, crafting paintings.

But the salt of the earth is taken to a spiritual level with one more addition to his pieces. It’s most prominently seen in “He crossed his bridge on the way up the hill,” where he draws on the spirits of his family’s legacy around a bridge in southeast Cedar Rapids.

Growing up, he would hunt for crawdads in the area near Indian Creek, just downhill from his grandparents’ house.

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“Bridges are transition points. You’re going from one point to another,” the artist explained. “I took the metaphor of that, as my grandparents and parents have passed on … and said this is a great metaphor for passing from one realm to the next.

“You cross the bridge on the way up the hill.”

The spirits, depicted as small circles, can be seen with a closer look at the windows in other barn paintings, too.

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Why barns?

With a topic that has been covered ad nauseam by rural artists across America, it was worth asking: “Why barns?”

The answer was simple: because they still captivate America with a type of longing few symbols evoke. When people think of the Midwest, they think of old barns and the history or nostalgia that surrounds them, Stamats said.

“There are people who really respond to those barns,” he said.

Abbe Creek Gallery co-owner Bob Campagna, whose co-owner, Chris Childress, also paints barns, agreed. He said Stamats brings a quality and individuality on the topic that complements other similar art.

With an “intensity of colors” that sidesteps tradition in depicting perhaps one of the most obvious paragons of rural American tradition, Campagna said the paintings make Iowa’s history three-dimensional.

“On the whole, there’s a nostalgia, a value of time of life in Iowa that is agrarian,” he said. “It’s a sentimental thing. There’s an internal feeling of love and peace in seeing an agrarian setting.”

How it started

After getting a degree in fine art from the Pratt Institute in New York and spending time in the Northeast, Stamats and his family moved back to Cedar Rapids in 1992, and he remained dormant as an artist until about 2005.

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His barn paintings, widely shown since a debut in 2020, have complemented a background of previous work in documenting invasive species from the Sac and Fox Trail, hummingbirds and other environmental topics.

“This is my swan song for being in this part of the world,” he said before his move to the Pacific Northwest this month.

Stamats hopes the exhibit encourages Iowans to continue carrying a sense of heritage, and to preserve the structures.

Comments: Features reporter Elijah Decious can be reached at (319) 398-8340 or elijah.decious@thegazette.com.