Sioux City Art Center Contrasts Rural Visions

(MENAFN- USA Art News) The Sioux City Art Center in Sioux City, Iowa, is currently showcasing“Pasture to Present: Grant Wood's Corn Room and New Visions of Rural America,” an exhibition that juxtaposes historical and contemporary artistic portrayals of the American West. The show, on view through December 6, 2026, highlights the interwar modernism of Iowa native Grant Wood alongside contemporary works by artists like Pennsyltucky's Samantha Joy Groff.

Groff's Harvest Lady (2026) offers a stark contrast to Wood's earlier depictions, such as his 1932 self-portrait. While Wood's work reflects a rural America perceived by an encroaching modern world, Groff's portraits engage with a society that seeks to hide from observers who are often engrossed in their phones.

Curator Christopher Atkins organized“Pasture to Present,” which surveys Western American art with a sensibility reminiscent of Saul Steinberg's 1976 New Yorker cover, View of the World from 9th Avenue. Many contemporary pieces in the exhibition emphasize the precarious state of rural landscapes, though the human element is less explored. Other featured artists include Wisconsin's Tom Uttech, with Mamakadjidgan (2011-12), and Minnesota's Lamar Peterson, who presents No Time For Weeds (2023). Peterson's painting, created after the George Floyd protests, shows a Black man finding tentative peace in his garden, yet still grappling with societal stigma. While an earlier display of Peterson's series at Fredericks & Freiser in 2023 highlighted political themes, these are less emphasized in the current exhibition.

Groff, a 32-year-old Yale MFA graduate and art instructor at Kutztown University, grew up in the Mennonite community of Franconia, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia. Her work, including the monumental Fentanyl Jesus (2024), incorporates sacred imagery and Christian mysticism, often casting marginalized figures in the divine light of headlights, suggesting a mercy absent from disillusioned property owners or drug dealers. The painting features three models, including an addict, whose failing bodies evoke a need for urgent societal attention. Groff described working with one model, saying,“The girl being cradled in the back, I've painted her before, and she's missing half of her teeth and she's so great to paint because she has meth mouth and she rocks it and it's hot. She's not afraid to be ugly in a painting, and in my work you have to be okay with that.”

The exhibition's centerpiece consists of Wood's Corn Room murals, originally commissioned in 1926 by Nebraska businessman Eugene Eppley for the dining room of Sioux City's former Martin Hotel. The murals, which suffered from being painted over and papered over by the 1950s, were rediscovered in the 1970s, gifted to the art center in 2007 following a sale, and subsequently restored last year through a $75,000 conservation effort. Wood's subtractive painting technique, which involved wiping away paint to define forms, left the murals in a fragile state. Groff's use of headlight-yellow hues in her works, like Fentanyl Jesus and Late Harvest, conceptually links to the golden light of Wood's murals, which evoke cycles of dust and abundance. Groff explained her inspiration, stating,“Even as this person might be sitting in a cornfield, things don't seem at peace.” She further noted a strange green light she observed in a Grant Wood piece, which evoked a sense of impending doom from a nearby power plant:“Even if the nuclear power it produces is quote-unquote safe, there's impending doom cooked into the environment where I live.”

Another artist, Rebecca Morgan, not featured in the current exhibition, also explores feminist Pennsyltucky regionalism. Her upcoming show,“Painting in the Apocalypse,” opens at the Asya Geisberg gallery in Tribeca on September 9. Morgan's work, which often uses dark humor and satire to explore class issues and the anxieties of rural women, tackles influencer tradwives and the performance of provincialism.

Source: Observer Arts

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