Stone City Art Colony

Instructors at the Stone City Art Colony. (left to right) Grant Wood,
Dave McCosh, Edward B. Rowan, Arnold Pyle, Adrian Dornbush,
and Marvin Cone. Not pictured Florence Sprague Smith

The road to Stone City curved through corn and limestone, pale as bone. The air buzzed with heat. You could smell the river before you saw it.

Then — laughter. Wild, unfiltered laughter bouncing off the quarry walls. That’s how you knew you’d found it.

It was 1932. The country was broke. So were most of the people who came here. They brought brushes, bedrolls, debts. Hope too, the kind that doesn’t last long but burns bright.

Grant Wood was on the porch when they arrived. Round glasses, overalls, a grin that could mean anything. “Don’t just stand there,” he shouted. “Grab a brush or grab a beer!”

Someone did both. Someone else tripped on a paint bucket. It began like that.

The Stone City Art Colony. Fifty bucks for the summer — if you had it. If you didn’t, nobody asked.

They strung lanterns between the trees. Slept in tents and old ice wagons that leaked when it rained. Cooked beans and eggs over campfires. Bacon fat and turpentine hung in the air.

“We didn’t have money to pay the farmer,” said Edward Rowan. “So we offered him exposure. Grant said the corn wouldn’t read Art Digest. He wasn’t wrong.”

Grant Wood decorating the ice wagon he lived in
at the Stone City Art Colony

By June, the place looked like a carnival that forgot to pack up. Fifty tents scattered across a field. Students from Chicago, Milwaukee, and Kansas City. Some had never seen a cow.

“I thought I’d taken the wrong train,” one said.

A girl from Kansas painted a cow pink just to see it glow under moonlight. A boy spent every day by the river, painting until his shoes disappeared in the mud.

Grant watched him. “Start with what you know,” he said. “Don’t chase ghosts. The best art comes from the dirt under your boots.”

The boy squinted. “You mean paint the mud?”

Grant grinned. “Exactly.”

It rained for days. The quarry flooded. Mosquitoes were as thick as smoke. “There was mud everywhere,” said one student. “Our tents collapsed twice. One night lightning hit a tree, and everyone cheered.”

“We lived on eggs, beans, and beer,” said another. “The beer truck came Fridays. That was church.”

Clem Haupt taught sculpture under a tree. “Don’t fight the stone,” he said. “Coax it.” Someone dropped a chisel and muttered, “It’s older than my soul.” Clem smiled. “Then you’re finally listening.”

At night, the quarry lit up with bonfires and jazz.
The river looked like a mirror.

A group of ice wagons the students and instructors lived in
at the Stone City Art Colony

A phonograph played Louis Armstrong until the needle snapped. Someone dragged a piano up the hill in a wagon. They danced barefoot in the mud. “Paris with blisters,” one woman called it.

A reporter came from Chicago. He took one look and said, “So this is where America’s next art revolution begins? Looks like a summer picnic.”

Grant shrugged. “That’s the thing about revolutions — they never look serious until they’re over.”

A critic called them “bumpkins painting bumpkins.” Grant said, “Then we’re painting the truth.”

One student wrote home: “Tell Father not to worry about the money. I sold a sketch for fifty cents. A man called it primitive. I think that’s good.”

There were fights. Arguments about color. Politics. Picasso.

Someone threw a palette knife. A couple broke up  and painted portraits of each other. Hers was called Liar. His was Woman with Terrible Ideas.

They hung side by side until the rain got them.

“We were filthy,” said one student. “We were poor. But it was the richest summer of my life.”

The storms came harder. One tore through the camp and sent sketchbooks spinning into the quarry. The next morning, Grant found one floating by the bank. “Looks better now,” he said. “The river signed it.”

They printed their own money. “Wood Nickels.” Grant’s face on one side, a cow on the other. You could buy breakfast or laundry with them. Rowan called it “the first currency backed by hope.”

By the second summer, 1933, the sparkle was fading. Fewer tents. Fewer students. More mosquitoes. No beer truck.

“We’re artists, not accountants,” Grant said, but he looked tired.

When it ended, they packed the tents and left. Someone painted See you next summer on the mess hall wall. Nobody did.

Still, something stuck. Regionalism. That’s what they called it later. Art that looked like home. Art that smelled like dirt and daylight.

Grant, Benton, Curry — they built it out of what Stone City left behind. “I had to go to France to appreciate Iowa,” Grant said. “There’s more geometry in a cornfield than in all of Paris.”

Maybe it was foolish. Maybe it was mud and mosquitoes and talk. “But for a moment we made a place where the land felt seen.”

There’s a photo from that last day. Grant in overalls, a cigarette hanging from his mouth, and students laughing around him. Behind them, a banner flaps in the wind: Here’s to Art in Iowa.

The quarry is quiet now. The grass has taken back the paths. You can still hear the wind. Sometimes, if you listen closely, it sounds like jazz. Or chisels. Or someone shouting across the field — “Grab a brush or grab a beer!”

For two short, wild summers, they believed beauty could grow out of mud. Maybe it did.