Who Arted: Weekly Art History for All Ages

Grant Wood was the American regionalist painter who rose to prominence almost overnight with his 1930 painting, American Gothic. In this episode, I spoke with Mike Divelbiss about Wood, his biography and his iconic work. Grant Wood was born in rural Iowa in 1891. His mother moved the family to the more urban Cedar Rapids in 1901 after his father passed away. Grant Wood showed a proclivity for the arts from an early age and after high school he pursued a broad based education at the Minneapolis Institute of Design and Handicraft. While he is best known today for his painting, Grant Wood worked in diverse media including functional art designing and building furniture as well as jewelry. In 1913, he moved to Chicago where he found work as a silversmith and eventually opened his own shop. During that time, he continued his education studying at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. A few years later, he moved back to Iowa to help take care of his mother and he found work as an art teacher. While teaching art, he also served as the local jack of all trades artist. He was commissioned to make a stained glass piece honoring veterans of World War I in addition to building furniture, painting etc. In 1930, Grant Wood submitted American Gothic in an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. The piece was immediately popular and acquired by the museum. This elevated Wood‘s stature in the art world and opened opportunities for him such as teaching at the University of Iowa. He used his prominence to continue to do good in his community starting an artist colony, and during The Great Depression, he led the government jobs program overseeing artists painting murals around Iowa. American Gothic has been an interesting icon of American and particularly midwestern art for decades. In Iowa, there was an immediate backlash to the piece by people who felt it portrayed them in an unflattering light. Of course as years went on, in the grips of the depression, the painting came to be viewed more as portraying the strength and quiet dignity of working people. Personally I would argue that there is truth in both interpretations. I would argue that Grant Wood has a deep love and fondness for his subjects and his community, but infused his work with a little bit of the caustic humor that is typical of the culture. He is a bit playful with his work on some level making fun of some of the stiffness of some of conventions of the art world and what he viewed as the absurd and pretentious ”gothic” window on a small rural home (interesting fact, the window that Wood found so pretentious was actually functional and purchased from a Sears catalog) but simultaneously he has a deep love and affection for everyone and everything he is portraying in his work. You can find a picture of American Gothic linked here, and as always on the website www.WhoArtEdPodcast.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Last week I began a series of mini episodes exploring color. For this week's episode, I share some interesting bits about the color red. The color red is associated with both love and anger. While many mistakenly believe red will anger a bull, people looking at the color red have been known to experience an increase in their heart rate. Listen to this mini episode to find out a little more about the color red. If you enjoy the podcast, please like, subscribe and leave a review. Follow me on twitter @WoodArtEd and find more on the website www.WhoArtEdPodcast.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Impressionist movement has been appealing to art lovers for about 150 years. While Claude Monet was not the sole inventor of the style, the movement was actually named after one of his paintings. Claude Monet was born in 1840. The 19th century brought us innovations that drastically changed how artists saw their role and their process. The advent of photography allowed artists to shift their focus away from use of paint as a means of recording what important people, places and things looked like. Artists started to shift their focus toward being more creative in their paintings focusing on color, and the expressive qualities that a camera could not capture. The tube of paint was also a 19th century invention. While it does not seem like such a big deal, the tube of paint made a wider range of hues available to artists and made those paints more portable. Monet and the Impressionists were well known to love painting outside. They stood in the landscape carefully capturing the colors as they saw them rather than staying in the studio painting from memory. While audiences today might look at paintings by Monet and other Impressionists as pleasant compositions that are fairly realistic, at the time, Impressionist paintings were revolutionary and viewed as scandalously sloppy when compared to the more traditional works that would have been seen in the Paris Salon. For this episode, we discussed one of Monet‘s water lilies paintings from what is perhaps his best known and most beloved series. Check out Water Lilies for 1906 at this link or on the website www.WhoArtEdPodcast.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For this week's mini episode, I wanted to take a little time to explain what color is and how we perceive color. This is going to be the first in a series of mini episodes about colors. I wanted to get some of the initial science out of the way before going into deeper dives about the histories and interesting facts behind individual colors and how artists have created those colors throughout history.  As always, if you enjoy this episode, please like, subscribe and leave a review. For my fellow art teachers, I keep every episode clean and school appropriate so you can use this podcast as a resource to help your students explore art history. You can find images and free resources including a virtual gallery you can embed in your classroom site at www.whoartedpodcast.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Not a lot of great painters were also professional football players. Ernie Barnes was an American artist who grew up in the South during the Jim Crowe era. Despite the numerous challenges, he worked hard, her persisted and he succeeded. As a teenager, a coach mentored Barnes helping him to become captain of the football team and a state champion at shot put. He attended a historically black university on an athletic scholarship but he majored in art. After college, Barnes went on to play pro football, but the owner of the New York Jets saw that Ernie Barnes was more valuable applying his talents to the canvas rather than the field. In the 1960s, Barnes quickly started gaining critical acclaim. His first show in New York sold out. His paintings not only hung in galleries, but also in pop culture on album covers and perhaps most famously on the television series Good Times. For this episode, my good friend and fellow elementary art teacher, Chuck Hoff discussed the history, and the incredible artistry of Ernie Barnes. We referenced a few pieces, but primarily focused our analysis on his painting The American Dream. As always you can find the work being discussed and other resources on the website www.WhoArtEdPodcast.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The art world is full of interesting characters. In so many ways, the artist‘s biography can be as important as their work. Nat Tate was an interesting character introduced to critics and tastemakers in 1998 when David Bowie hosted a dinner party to help launch a new book Nat Tate: Am American Artist 1928-1960. While the book has the sleepy title of a non-fiction book, it was actually a novel framed as a biography. Nat Tate was a tragic abstract expressionistic painter who destroyed 99% of his work before his untimely death. It was a compelling narrative of art and an artist lost to history. It was also pure fiction. While Bowie enlisted the help of a Picasso biographer to tell tales of Tate‘s interactions with Picasso, Braque and others, Nat Tate never existed. A week later, a journalist published a story of how important figures in the art world fell victim to this hoax. Oddly while Nat Tate was not real, there are real ”surviving” artworks attributed to him. In 2011, Sotheby‘s auctioned off a Nat Tate painting, Bridge No. 114, which sold for over 7000 pounds.  As always you can see the work at www.WhoArtEdPodcast.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I wanted to start 2021 with something fun, so I decided to do an episode about a classic episode of The Simpsons. In season 10 episode 19 titled Mom and Pop Art, Homer becomes an outsider artist. While much of the humor is derived from the premise that Homer Simpson is inept and could never be a decent artist, but I thought it would be fun to consider what kind of an artist Homer really is. His first sculpture was created accidentally from a failed attempt to build a backyard barbecue pit. After tastemakers declared the failed grill to be an artistic triumph, Homer leans in to his new career as an artist. Of course after the initial success that came so easily, Homer discovers that maintaining an art career is difficult as he presents a series of works that are considered too derivative of his earlier work as they all had the same feel behind them. This actually is one of the least true criticisms I observed in the satirical look at the art world. While in the Simpson‘s world art critics are fickle and looking to be constantly shocked, in reality one of the most sure paths to success is for an artist to develop a signature style so their work is easily identified to patrons. Consistency is crucial to an artist‘s marketability. Still Homer‘s falling out of favor led to a rare bit of introspection and growth for the character. Marge guides him through the museum and Homer applies his learning to creating one final masterpiece - The Grand Canals of Springfield. If you set aside the reckless destruction of property and the fact that such an act would have wreaked havoc endangering thousands of people and animals, it was actually a fairly interesting work. Ultimately, I consider Homer to be most interesting as a work of art rather than as an artist, but through any lens I find him delightful and thought provoking. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is a second mini episode recapping the takeaways from the artists covered thus far in season 2. In this episode, I share my takeaways from the episodes about Phil Hansen, Wassily Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Charuvi Agrawal, and Njideka Akunyili Crosby. The second half of season 2 will start on Monday, January 18th.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I will be taking a bit of a break. This week and next week will be the podcast equivalent of a clip show as I will rundown just the main takeaways I had from each artist I discussed throughout this season. In this episode I talked about the first five episodes which were about Marcel Duchamp, Burton Morris, Yayoi Kusama, Alexander Calder, and Barbara Kruger. Next week, I will run down the rest of the artists featured thus far. New episodes will be back in your feed starting Monday, January 18th.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Few people know this, but Art used to be an Olympic event. Starting in the 1912 games, artists could win Olympic gold, silver and bronze medals in five categories of art.  For more information and resources, check out the website www.WhoArtEdPodcast.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices