Cultivating Citizens The Regional Work of Art in the New Deal Era

"Cultivating Citizens rethinks the aesthetics and politics of regionalism in the United States during the 1930s and 1940s. During this period, painters Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and John Steuart Curry formed a loose alliance as American Regionalists. Some lauded their depictions of the rural landscape and hardworking inhabitants of America's midwestern heartland. Others deemed Regionalist painting dangerous, regarding its easily understood realism as a vehicle for jingoism, chauvinism, and even fascism. Cultivating Citizens shifts the terms of this ongoing debate over subject matter and style by considering heretofore neglected Regionalist programs of art education and concepts of artistic labor."--Provided by publisher.